SlideMagic 2.0 is almost getting to a point where I can call it ‘feature complete’. Once reached, I will be spending most of my time on hardening the application to make it 100% enterprise-grade, before venturing into adding more capabilities.

The last obstacle on the road are the ‘connectors’, a left over from the SlideMagic 1.0 UI that are not very intuitive to use. The connectors where meant to cover the 2 minimal line drawing elements that any presentation app needs to have:

• The ability to connect boxes in diagrams (flow charts, org charts) with lines and arrows

• The ability to create a visual flow in a slide with big arrows that show cause and effect

This is very tricky to accomplish in SlideMagic, as the app stubbornly insists on not requiring any freehand drawing or dragging that breaks the slide’s grid, and the current ‘connectors’ make that tension perfectly clear.

I think I might have come up with an elegant solution to this problem:

1. Simplify the current ‘connectors’ and use them solely for fat/big cause effect arrows

2. Add a simple grid based drawing capability for connecting boxes.

I got number 2 to work on my development machine, but it still requires a lot of work to make things intuitive, but the hardest part of the work has been cracked.

Luckily there is an advantage that SlideMagic does not have millions of users yet, we can still wiggle the software to get product/market fit, something almost all presentation design apps have failed to reach. Work in progress.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash