New arrows are now live

The latest version of SlideMagic has the new arrow feature available, finally enabling me to discontinue the dreaded connectors. Arrows are big and bold to show cause-effect relationships or other forces. I made an algorithm to let them do the right thing in terms of layout in various box sizes, and in various aspect ratios, both for horizontal and vertical shapes. In PowerPoint and Keynote it is fiddly to get arrows to look exactly the same once you start changing the angles of the pointer by hand.

When converting to PowerPoint (a pro feature), your arrows will show up as editable PowerPoint arrow shapes.

I can now call SlideMagic 99% feature complete (hmm, line charts?) and will focus on hardening the application to make it absolutely stable.

The legacy connector feature will stay in the background. If you load an old slide that uses it, the legacy arrows will be rendered and you can edit them. If you have to add more legacy connectors, simply shift-click on the connector icon, and you will be given the option to use the old feature.

The new arrows also give me more design freedom to start expanding the template library with new slide layouts that features these ‘fat’ arrows.

Fat arrows are great for showing cause-effect relationships

Arrows follow the color scheme of the cell, black on accent, will give you this result

You can place background images behind arrow elements

SlideMagic arrows are converted to fully editable PowerPoint arrow shapes when converting (pro feature)

Thinner arrows can be created with the line new line drawing feature

The perfect arrow...

I am replacing the connectors in SlideMagic with 2 features. The relatively thin lines that connect boxes in a diagram went live yesterday. Currently I am working on the 2nd feature: fat arrows to show cause-effect relationships or other forces.

As I already discussed back in 2017, it is tricky to get arrows to look right in presentation software. The aspect ratio of the containing box, the angles of the arrow, some come out great, others won’t.

And even if you got one right on your slide by moving the various sliders in the shape, how do you make sure that the 3 below it look exactly the same? Oh, and then you need to insert a fifth one and squeeze everything a bit…

I think I am on to a possible solution. I scribbled an algorithm on a piece of paper, now let’s see how to bring it to life in SlideMagic, and then convert them to PowerPoint. The latter might have to be via an image rather than a dynamic shape. Below is a screenshot of my development machine. Work in progress.

The new line drawing mode

I just deployed version 2.4.16 on the server that has the first version of the new line drawing engine of SlideMagic built in. This will be the replacement of the cumbersome ‘connector’ feature that was inherited from SlideMagic 1.0.

Any presentation app needs some sort of approach to drawing lines, especially to connect boxes in diagrams. Freehand drawing and line dragging goes straight against the philosophy of SlideMagic, which forces you to keep everything lined up, evenly spaced out on a grid.

The connectors solved this by micromanaging lines, you have designate a box to be a line box, and then meticulously set the line configuration inside it. The result is a line grid that perfectly scales up and down with your grid. But this can be a pain to maintain, especially if you are working in a very fine grid.

So I can came up with a compromise and added a separate line drawing layer to the ‘frame; of the slide, the background that sits behind the work area of the slide (i.e., not the title and the footnote). Selecting the frame will highlight a Manhattan-like grid of dots, between which you can draw any (straight) line or arrow you want, across the entire slide. This line patter will move with changes to the grid, but - and this is the concession - is not 100% tied to the boxes in your chart. But I think it is a price well worth paying, imperfections are easy to fix.

A side effect, it is now also easy to draw a fat border around a group of boxes if needed.

Below is a bare bone organisation diagram.

The old connector system required fiddly editing, see below.

The new line drawing layer makes things easier. As soon as you select the frame of the slide (click the long bar at the top, or the tall column to the left of the slide), you are presented with a grid of dots.

You are free to add lines from dot to dot across the entire slide (yes, even ones at an angle)

All of this makes it easy to connect boxes in the required way in your diagram

Feel free to download the latest version of SlideMagic and play around with the new feature and let me know your feedback. There are a lot of design decisions that I had to make. Keep line editing mode active to go to the next dot, connect line segments in one shape, dragging of lines (or not). I think the current model works, where lines stay on the chart as individual segments. I will need to implement the multi-select on them though, and work on an algorithm that removes double segments, and combines two consecutive segments into one.

Fixing the connectors

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

Update

I have entered my usual summer blogger schedule (fewer posts) and am now working really hard to get SlideMagic 2.0 right. The feature list for SlideMagic 2.0 is now almost completely implemented. In software, there are always more things to add, but the product as it stands at the moment is starting to get very useful. Over the last 2 weeks I put in very big changes that might not look big from a user’s perspective, but required huge changes under the hood:

• The new '“side title” layout (my preferred)

• Slide search previews in your own preferred colour, layout, font style

• Horizontal and vertical waterfall charts

• Dynamically generated slides with a relevant image (i.e., unlimited slide in the template bank)

• Better rendering of slides and images on higher resolution screens

• Useful image compression in the background

The only big one that remains outstanding is a better way to make diagrams with lines and arrows, the connector solution is not perfect.

In the background I am now tweaking lots of user interface details: how borders fit around thumbs, mouse behaviour when hovering over things, an “endless scroll” is now working for image search, messages that warn you when things go wrong, or when your app is busy searching, making sure that thumbnails distribute nicely over the screen when zooming, minimising the times when the app needs to re-render a slide or image to make the workflow calmer, etc. etc.

I start to look at app design the way I look at slide design. Things need to be absolutely right, and even tiny deviations, irregularities, small mistakes, can really upset me, while most people won’t even notice them. This is what I think ultimately leads to good design, one by one, these details do not matter, I you add them all though, something works without you having an ability to point your finger at exactly why.

If you tried SlideMagic 3 months ago, you almost won’t recognise it (sort of), today (at the moment of writing, version 2.4.12 is the latest one). Work in progress

SlideMagic slide search results now in colour

Another day, another improvement

I stuck to showing images on slide search results in black and white because I would be sure that the photos would not clash with the accent colour for the slide users had picked (most users will swap SlideMagic blue for their own logo colour). That worked, but it came at a price: slide templates all looked a bit sad. This is not only due to the greyscale colours, but also because of the way the greyscale filter was applied: many colours were translated into too dark tints of grey I think.

This morning I re-rendered the entire slide database (the server is still a bit tired) and images in slide templates now show up in colour.

It is worth the trade-off I think. Of course it is possible to go back to a black and white image in the SlideMagic app, simple untick the ‘colour’ box and the image will show up as grey scale (you can always go back to colour if you want).

The colour option is only available for the slides that I added more recently, after I switched off the colour option when ‘flattening’ or compressing slides. Obviously new templates will all appear in colour, or I will set them explicitly to black and white when I feel that it serves the slide’s message better.

This addition of colour coincides nicely with the more mature SlideMagic product I think, slowly but certainly it comes out in its full shiny colours :-)

Let me know what you think.

Waterfall charts in SlideMagic!

Finally, they have arrived. Waterfall charts in SlideMagic. Everything lines up with other elements in your slide. Super easy to make and edit, super easy to convert to editable PowerPoint / Excel charts if needed. Download version 2.4.7 of SlideMagic to try it out (both for Windows and Mac). This is a brand new module in the app, please let me know if you experience any issues or have other suggestions.

Slide search results in your own colours

After updating to the latest version of SlideMagic, your slide search results will no longer appear in SlideMagic blue, 4x3 aspect, but in your own personal colour palette, and in your own preferred screen size.

Unlike most template banks, SlideMagic now generates slides on the fly the moment when you search for them, rather than serving pre-fab files. This opens interesting opportunities for future features :-). Work in progress.

Coming soon

Search results in the SlideMagic app show up as small screen shots of slides in SlideMagic’s blue colour at the moment. It would take a lot of bandwidth to send over the full slide designs when previewing templates.

I am making changes now on the server to make it possible that slide previews show up in your own colour scheme, with your own corporate logo on it, and in the layout you prefer(4:3, 16x9, black background, dark background).

The app will be upgraded first, after which I will make the feature available for paying subscribers on the web site as well. Users who prefer PowerPoint downloads will be able to download PPTX layouts with their own colours and logos already activated.

Work in progress.

Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash

My preferred 16:9 layout for presentations

I just pushed a big update to SlideMagic (2.4) to the server and it contains a brand new 16:9 slide layout, the slide title. Most monitors today are widescreen, but unlike movies, I think 4:3 slides look much better. Text lines that run across the entire slide are hard to read, and wide screen slides always force you to make very “stretched” slide layouts.

The side title is the best of both worlds. The title of the slide is moved to the left, and the slide contain area is scaled up now that it has more space at the top. It stays in a 4:3 ratio though. The footer and logo is also moved to the left, creating even more space. The entire design shows up without black bars on a wide screen monitor. Below is an example.

It follows an approach I already blogged about in 2016

SlideMagic has now 4 screen modes, and you can switch instantly between them:

1. Traditional 4:3 narrow

2. 16:9 wide screen

3. A 4:3 slide with an explanation panel to the side to leave notes for when you are not there in person to present the slide

4. The new and shiny 16:9 side title

Soon, I will rerun the PowerPoint conversion algorithms on the server to increase the size of the SlideMagic PoiwerPoint template database with 25%, each slide will now be available in the new format as well,.

(Hmm, the side panel needs some more padding, I will fix that [Fixed in 2.4.1]). There are a number of other new features introduced in version 2.4.

It is now also easier to select the “frame” element of the slide, I added 2 thin selection bars next to the regular grid selectors.

Also the right-to-left mode is completely rewritten (SlideMagic is based in Tel Aviv :-)) so that the side panel and side title show up in the right place.

Version 2.4 is a major update, please report any glitches you might experience.

"Operating system updates" for presentations

Every year Apple releases operating system upgrades for computers, tablets, and phones. Your apps and documents have the same content, but look slightly different. I am trying to push this concept to the world of presentations.

It has already happened (sort of). The slide-out panel to right changes the look and feel of your presentation without changing the content. Over time, I have made subtle changes to font sizes and layout proportions, which means that every SlideMagic presentation in the world will have a slightly different look. Switching to a dark slide background turn the colours of your presentation upside down (in a good way), far beyond just making the background black.

I will try to push this further, by adding more layout options , your slides will look entirely different, including the ones you made 6 months ago, but you can always switch back to another layout format.

Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash

What is new in V23

Some new features in version 2.3.23 of the SlideMagic desktop app:

• Super-fast responses when resizing your main window, or reshuffling slides in the story view, even if they contain big images. If the app does not need to re-render an image, it won’t. Rescaling slides is now done by your computer’s graphics processor directly, rather than my bespoke code.

• More clever image repositioning when you change the aspect rate of a shape by expanding and collapsing boxes. Still not perfect, but the app starts to do the right thing.

• Changing the slide aspect or background has now been added to the “view” drop down menu, so you can switch back and forth really fast without having to go through the settings menu.

• Subtle changes to the user interface, that makes the app look sharper on higher resolution displays.

The app will try to update itself in the background, or if you are impatient, go here to download the latest version immediately.

Photo by gdtography on Unsplash

Slide template for a RACI matrix

On request of a user, I have added templates with a RACI matrix to the SlideMagic database. (It does not happen often, but this is the first time I actually heard about this consulting framework, the responsibility assignment matrix). In SlideMagic it is super easy to manage all the columns and rows of the table. If your colleagues are not ready for SlideMagic yet, use the app to create the chart, then export to PowerPoint.

How to change the default colour in SlideMagic

SlideMagic has a simple colour scheme: lots of variations of white, black, and grey, and one strong accent colour. Why?

SlideMagic is all about making presentation design efficient. This simple colour layout almost always looks great, and is very recognisable when you set the accent colour to the dominant colour in your logo.

How do you customise SlideMagic to your own preferred colour instead of SlideMagic blue?

1. Go to the settings menu by clicking the cog wheel in the bottom left of the screen

2. You have 2 options to set the new accent colour:

   • Upload an image, after which the app will extract suggested colours from the photo (pro-tip: upload your logo)

   • Enter an RGB code directly

3. Go back to your slides and the whole deck will be set in the new colour scheme. Also notice that the app itself changes its user interface colour to the complement of the presentation colour you picked.

Quick update

As usual during the summer, things are a bit quieter on the blog at the moment. But instead of me and my family traveling the world, I am turning the SlideMagic rendering engine upside down. I focus mainly on performance. You might not have noticed, but the current app is re-rendering slides frequently, especially with screen resizes and in the story view mode. In the new version, these re-renders will go down to almost zero. Furthermore, I am making the app respond better to different screen resolutions and sizes.

My approach to writing the app is similar to the way I (used to) build financial models. Start simple, complicate and add things, and then clean up and simplify again. Dramatic simplification fo the code will enable me to think about a selective number of new features again

Photo by Lukas ter Poorten on Unsplash.

URL juggling

Some readers noted that the slidemagic URL sometimes returns an error. As a result I am juggling the URLs fo the app, template store and blog once more. The slidemagic.com URL will now point to the main site and app, the newly acquired slidemagic.blog will point to the blog that I host with squarespace. The blog.slidemagic.com URL will be phased out.

I am putting redirects in place so that everything keeps on working as it should. My main focus is the 10+ year archive of blog posts. My SEO ranking might drop a bit, but this is not my main worry (yet), as I am still focussing on getting the users that are trying out the SlideMagic app to keep on using it, before ramping up marketing. SlideMagic is not a catch-convert-sell slide template business (there are thousands of those), but an attempt to find a way to change the way people make presentations, which requires some patience.

If you are interested in the details: squarespace does not really work well with subdomains (blog.slidemagic.com, instead of www.slidemagic.com), and does work well with the Cloudflare content delivery network + DDOS protection (Israel-based web sites are not always popular). Pointing a blog.slidemagic to squarespace, also means that you have to point the “naked domain” slidemagic.com to squarespace, which then clashes with my server etc.

Let’s hope it all goes back to normal soon.

Photo by Harrison Moore on Unsplash

Working on improved image cropping

Working with images is turning out to be one of the most powerful uses of SlideMagic. The built-in image search gives access to an endless flow of great images, and the grid makes it really easy to layout these photos in a beautiful and consistent way on a slide.

Aligning images has always been difficult in presentation software (it is only worse in word processors), and that bit is solved by the SlideMagic grid. Next up is image cropping. Most design tools use some sort of overlay that allows you to mask/reveal an image. Even as a professional designer, I still struggle with this.

In SlideMagic, you simply drag an image around in a box to decide what part of the photo you want to reveal. I am working on 2 improvements:

• Showing the entire image in semi-opaque when you are editing/dragging it around to give you. a better orientation of what you are doing

• Creating a way to keep the image focused on the most relevant part regardless of changes to aspect ratios or zoom levels of the photo. At the moment, I store to image positioning versions (one for 16x9 and one for 4x3), but in future releases I want to automate this

The challenge here is to offer something that works without turning SlideMagic into a complicated photo editor. Work in progress.

Organisation charts

Organisation cultures are changing. Traditional hierarchies becomes less important, and project teams often become the engine of doing things. Also outsiders such as freelancers do not fit in nicely in big structures. At my time in McKinsey in the 1990s, we could have full meetings about whether a line should be dotted or not, and who would have to be drawn slightly higher than someone else on a page. Mistakes here were especially painful in a presentation to the management team.

Organisation chars in presentation are tricky for two reasons: it is hard to get all the boxes right on the page from a technical point of view, and it is hard to make everyone happy that the hierarchy and lines of the boxes reflect reality.

At the request of a user I have added a few more organisation charts to the SlideMagic slide template database. Complex organisation diagrams are not SlideMagic territory (if they are. hard to draw, the audience must also find them hard to understand). Instead, I created a few simple templates that can lay out the structure of an organisation in simple way, cutting the amount of lines, and increasing the size of text boxes.

If you present your chart as a a rough summary of the organisation rather than an exact reflection of hierarchy, you might just get away with it. If you pretend to be precise, people will nitpick..

The “connector” element in SlideMagic is still the weakest drawing tool and I am thinking about a new diagramming user interface now that my front end HTML design skills have improved significantly over the past year. As usual, the problem is not technical. Also in PowerPoint with its more sophisticated diagramming interface, it is hard to get connecting. lines to do what you want. They always angle and bend in a different way than you want them to.

The SlideMagic grid structure comes in really handy when changing screen aspect ratios, or adding/deleting columns in your organisation chart. Everyone lines up instantly. In PowerPoint rebalancing an org chart is major surgery.

In the mean time, feel free to reach out and/or email sketches of organisation diagrams you think cannot be generated from the current template database, and I will do my best to add them to the collection.

Some UI improvements

Version 2.3.18 went up with a few improvements including 2 noticeable ones:

• A much brighter app user interface colour. As you know, SlideMagic mirrors the colour you use in your presentation: if your presentation uses blue, the SlideMagic app accent colours (to show things you selected for example) will turn to its complement: orange. Up until v2.3.18, this was the exact colour opposite, creating problems for users with muted, very dark accent colours. In the latest version I forced up the brightness and saturation of the app accent colour so that it clearly stands out in all cases. Look how that orange is now popping out for my SlideMagic blue colour.

• An improved image user interface, where the crop modes “center”, “contain”, and “cover” are now clearly highlighted. Also, SlideMagic now shows the mega bytes an image consumes as soon as you select it. Sometimes, a very large image is actually not that big in storage, but the opposite happens as well, that tiny image on your slide takes up 10MB of space and as a result you are compressing down the entire slide deck. Now it is easy to catch these memory eaters quickly and compress the image if needed. Compression no longer “flattens” the image effects (greyscale, blur, flip), so you can re and undo these on the compressed image as well.

Download the latest version of SlideMagic for Windows or Mac to try it out.

Preserve image positioning when switching between 4x3 and 16x9

SlideMagic swaps instantly between traditional and widescreen aspect ratios. The slide content stays nicely in the slide frame, everything stays aligned and you can revert instantly.

Because SlideMagic does not distort aspect ratios of images (no stretching or squeezing), the positioning of an image changes slightly if you switch between a narrow and a wide screen layout. This can be annoying for images where positioning is a big deal (compare the lined up eye lines of a series of portrait images versus a long-distance shot of a mountain range). If you switch aspects 5 minutes before your meeting, your presentation is misaligned. (This is obviously still a lot better than PowerPoint where everything would stretch and move to unpredictable places when picking a different screen format)

Well, SlideMagic fixed this last hitch as well. I just released V2.3.17 (download SlideMagic here for both Windows and Mac) which now keeps 2 sets of image size and crop frames, one for each slide aspect ratio. You switch back and forth, so will the image positioning. Make sure to double check each image once in both aspect ratios, and the settings will be saved together with the presentation.

For future releases I am studying more advanced image analysis, where I could automatically recognise a face in an image for example, and lock in the position of the eyes (maybe the first true “AI” application in SlideMagic).