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Software
This amazing visualization shows the history of Europe and the coming and going of various empires in the style of the Agario video game, where bubbles collide and merge.
This video was made using Adobe After Effects. In theory you could do something like this in PowerPoint: a slide for every year with animations and then loop the whole thing. It is a lot of work though.
A new version of SlideMagic is deployed, and should automatically install. This version includes security patches, and a slightly less strong background color difference between the main slide and the explanation box view.
The explanation box is one of 4 views of SlideMagic:
Narrow 4 x 3 aspect ratio
Wide 16 x9 aspect ratio
Title on the side
Explanation box view, which creates space for an extra text box where you can enter a few paragraphs to explain a slide in case you send the deck without being present yourself.
The text in the side panel stays saved in the file even if you go to another view, so you can decide when you want to show it, and when to hide (for example in a live presentation).
Presentation software like PowerPoint or SlideMagic have 2 modes: one for slide editing, and one for showing the presentation to an audience. In video calls, I often see the presenter leaving the presentation in edit mode. The slide is visible, but with all the edit controls around, plus grid lines and other markings. On the side is a list of thumbnails of all the slides in the presentation. For the presenter, this can be handy. She knows the deck in and out and can quickly jump around the slides.
For the audience it is confusing.
The slide in edit mode looks unfinished.
Often the thumbnails on the left are so big that you could actually read them, distracting attention away from the main slide.
In SlideMagic, presentation view creates 2 separate windows: one for the slide to be shown to the audience, one with the controls for the presenter. So in Zoom, or other video conference tools, you can share just the slide, while staying in full control of the presentation in a window that is not visible to the audience.
Another software-related post after my computer swap. SlideMagic is an app that runs both on Mac OSX and Windows machines, so I need a Windows computer to compile and build the software (luckily from one code base). Some observations:
Desktop operating systems are very mature pieces of software, and sliding more and more in the background. On my old Mac, I did not even bother to upgrade to Monterrey as of now, because of compatibility issues of some very old music production software that I use. Having used Monterrey for a week now, I still hardly notice the difference.
I used the opportunity to upgrade to Windows 11. Windows is now totally at par with the Mac when it comes to look and feel. The whole experience looks great and works well.
On Macs with an Intel chip, I would install Windows using Bootcamp. Starting the machine with Windows would leave no trace of anything Mac: you are working on a pure Intel-based Windows machine. Now that Apple switches to different chips, I have opted again for a virtual machine. Windows 11 runs nicely inside a window alongside my Mac software. It is easy to exchange files, very quick going back and forth between the systems, and most importantly, it is easy to adjust the hard disk space your Windows machine takes on your Mac, nothing is set in stone.
More and more software is written like SlideMagic, one code base creates identical looking apps for both Windows and Mac.
With the differences in software / UI disappearing, the main differentiator between Mac and Windows is actually the hardware: build quality, design, and most importantly the quality of the screen. Macs are usually great, but in the world of Windows, there is a huge range of machines, from really poor/cheap to fantastic/expensive.
It is amusing to read earlier posts on the same topic, some of them going back for more than a decade.
Over the past year I have been working on another project together with my co-founder Anat Naschitz (my partner in life as well). This week we are quietly revealing things to the public: 9xchange is a marketplace for molecules. There are a lot of molecules on the shelves of pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, and academic institutions that never get turned into drugs. It takes a lot of effort, and requires you to reveal your pipeline strategy to start selling these assets to players who could use them. 9xchange is going to make that easier.,
I have not spent a huge amount of effort on the design of the landing page, most energy went into coding a secure B2B marketplace (a much bigger technical challenge than the SlideMagic app). But I like the graphical language which is very different from most corporate websites. Have a look here. The messaging of the front page is likely to change as we interact more with users.
Membership of 9xchange is still by invitation only at the moment. Contact me if you work and/or invest in the healthcare industry and would like to try it out.
This project does not mean the end of SlideMagic, which will continue to be developed, don’t worry,.
AI is making an entry in office applications. See this article with a funding announcement for a company. The idea is to analyse human computer input (text, clicks) and try to automate routine tasks (think booking a flight, making a quarterly financial report).
What about presentation design?
Artificial Intelligence is a very generic buzz word, and we need to be highly specific when talking about its application in any area. What the technology does is analyse vast amounts of inputs and outputs and then reverse engineer their relations without “understanding” anything of the underlying thought process that a human would go through.
I can see one type of presentation design that could be subject to automation, the 1-on-1 slide makeover. There are many designers, design agencies out there that take your slides, do not edit their content at all, but simply make them look prettier:
Align and distribute layouts
Fix inconsistent fonts and colors
Change font sizes
Etc. etc.
Feeding thousands of before and afters will ultimately lead to a computer system that could do this automatically.
They key to slide design is though to have the courage to start editing in the content. Rephrase text. Break up slides into multiple layouts. Remove table columns. Round up numbers. Change the type of graph. Etc. etc. And that is at slide level, in most cases deeper surgery is required: a reflow of the whole story line.
At McKinsey in the 1990s, we used ‘Solo’ presentation software to make slides. It was far ahead of its time (before PowerPoint became the standard). It had a very advanced template engine that enabled you to recreate charts in the McKinsey style. The software required some skill, and charts were usually created by professional graphics designers who took hand-drawn charts as an input. Back then, Solo would run on Macs only. Which was the reason that McKinsey issued Macbooks to their staff at the end of the 1990s, so that consultants could edit (and create) their own slides if they had to.
Ultimately PowerPoint was the end of Solo. Not because of its capabilities, but because McKinsey’s clients would have this installed on their machines, and these clients wanted to edit slides themselves. And with the advent of PowerPoint, the slide format became less consistent in McKinsey. (Both the result of a less sophisticated template library, and the reduced influence of professional graphics designers to create the slides).
I checked this morning, and Solo is still around, here is the web site: https://www.axoninc.com/. Support has ended in 2020 though. I tried installing the demo on Mac, but failed. The PowerPC engine no longer works. It does work on Windows 10 though, but I had to click a button 587 times because the license of the trial version expired 587 days ago (on 7 February 2022). Those clicks were rewarded with some good memories though, I have added some screen shots.
The thumbnail strip to the left of most presentation software is not only useful for switching to other slides, it also is a good feedback mechanism for slide layouts. It is like sitting in the back row of a big auditorium, or viewing the slide in a small preview window on a Zoom call.
For my next venture, I am actually getting into a lot of “slide” design work: displaying financial data in a web browser with totally unpredictable screen sizes and screen aspect ratios. This problem has been solved for traditional web sites with text and pictures. (That is pictures where you do not really care how they are cropped).
For financial information, this is not the case. Spreadsheet-like tables that look good both on a 27” widescreen monitor and a smartphone screen, for example. All this layout work is not the core of what this venture will be about, but I am learning a ton that can feed back into SlideMagic. And vice versa, the SlideMagic chart engine, could take data from this new system and create presentations pretty much on the fly.
To be continued.
Automation is likely to take out a large share of middle-level jobs in the economy. Gardners, hairdressers, etc. will always be needed. Top scientists, managers, creatives, probably will not be automated anytime soon. In between, it is a different story.
“Automation” has made its inroad in the workplace as well. Most visibly in the area of storage and filing. But also in the way we work. Think of the amount of people that were employed typing up formal documents and memos, planning meetings, arranging phone calls. Back in the 1990s, running analysis on your business required armies of analysts, often sourced from external consulting firms (I was one of them).
The same trend is happening in presentations. Back in the 1990s, we would discuss interim project results using hand drawn charts, that then would be produced by professional graphics designers into a final document. The production of such a document could take weeks, where the sole focus was one communication, and the underlying analysis barely moved.
Bit by bit, the professional designers were replaced by analysts skipping the hand drawn charts and making them directly on their computers. Analysts first, followed by more senior staff. Every meeting now looked like a final presentation.
The trend will continue. “Presentations” will become simpler and quicker to make. In 10 years we will look back and remember the days when we used to spend so much time trying to put a complicated slide deck together for a simple decision.
SlideMagic is here to help.
A “presentation template” is usually a PowerPoint file that new employees receive on their first they of work. There is more to a presentation template I think.
Your corporate visual communication style/culture
Consulting firms: lots of complicated diagrams and frameworks, meant for solving a problem rather than presenting
Investment banks: dense text and tables with graphs, meant for reading rather than presenting
Consumer goods company: product packaging shots and bullets
University: list of bullets
Etc. etc.
The actual software file that holds the basis layouts, logo, and colours (this is the one you get on the first day of your employment)
Running versions of important presentation documents that get constantly updated and tweaked
Sales presentations, each for a different lead or a different customer segment
Quarterly results presentations with - well - different quarterly results
Strategic planning presentations, each one for a different product group
Etc. etc.
Most of the day-to-day presentation work in companies is in step 3, the tweaking of existing documents to update it for the latest sales meeting or board meeting. These presentations are in fact the “templates”, not the empty file.
In most presentation design software the tweaking of an existing slide is tricky and over time a slide degrades after many iterations where users insert the wrong fonts, colours, and trip up a decent slide layout that worked for 5 boxes, but not for 6. (“Template rot”).
The above is true for both existing corporate presentations and shiny new templates purchased online. The latter look amazing fresh off the press, but it shows when a non-designer tried to fit it to her needs.
With SlideMagic we are trying to fix this. Make it easy to create decent looking presentations from scratch, but even more importantly, make it super easy to tweak this presentations, keeping everything aligned on an brand.
By fixing step 2 and 3, we hope to fix step 1 as well…
We are doing some SlideMagic user interviews and the term “secret weapon” came up. One user, somewhere in a big office tower, is a lone user of SlideMagic and uses the build-in PowerPoint conversion to share slides with colleagues. People start to notice the difference in the slide the person produces.
Here are some situations where you can use SlideMagic as a secret weapon, a starting point for setting up the beginning of your presentation. Most of these slides are very time consuming to set up in PowerPoint or Keynote:
A perfectly lined up, massive grid of logos (you finished the 10 x 4 grid, and now you need to move to 7 x 6 because you got 2 more logos)
Data tables with bar charts that need to line up (oops, 12 rows instead of 10)
2x2, 3x3 matrices, other consulting style matrices
A diagram with boxes that are connected with arrows
A team chart where all the headshots need to have more or less the same size, with the “eye line” at the same height
Nobody needs to know / find out that you use SlideMagic, but we would not mind if you spread the secret…
Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash
A bit of a technical post. Google Docs is changing the way it renders documents. Instead of HTML, it will move to something called “canvas” (no, not Canva, the design platform), partly because of the same limitations of web page layouts that I have been battling with SlideMagic.
HTML was created in the 1980s to render text and links in web browsers. Over the years many features were added that improved its graphics capabilities. The result are the modern web pages, mobile apps, and desktop apps such as SlideMagic that we know today.
HTML is great for displaying content on a huge range of devices, different sizes, different process speeds, different resolutions, different generations of technology. The NYT front page will look great on all these screens.
But graphics applications require more than that. Specifying the exact crop of an image, exactly setting the font size to prevent an orphan word of a title dropping to the next line. What-you-see-is-what-you get editing. Copy-pasting of text or images. Exactly scaling up or down a layout rather than changing the point sizes of fonts with steps.
In SlideMagic, I had to apply a lot of tricks to get things to work, and basically created my own (x, y) coordinate space to do what I want. It looks like Google is going a similar way. My approach is to use vector graphics, that can scale to any size you want while being able to detect mouse clicks on elements.
Google is taking it further and moving to a complete blank “canvas”. Everything is “painted” bit by bit, letters are drawn, images are merged in, selection boxes are merged in with the document. To drag a box of text, Google will have to write software that fills the pixels of the box with the underlying pixels, then redraw all the pixels a bit to the right.
Google has slightly more developers than SlideMagic that can work on this. Hopefully it will open source the technology it develops for this for others to use.
[Geeks can enjoy a full discussion here]
Photo by Kai Wenzel on Unsplash
Zoom is introducing some “immersive” backgrounds to group video calls. A nice try, but something does not look completely right in this image:
It is very hard to get 3D photoshops right. If it does not look perfect, I recommend not even giving it a try in your presentation. It is like handing the pen to your 4 year old for one of your 30 slides. Instant loss of professionalism.
Why is it tricky for Zoom? Headshots are taking at different distances from the camera, and the camera position of the room is very high, in an environment with a very strong unnatural 3D distortion.
If I were Zoom, I would keep it simpler, with an artificial rendering of headshots, taking out their distracting backgrounds of bookshelves, kitchens and children’s toys, and paying careful attention to the relative size of the heads, position of the eye line.
Microsoft made some updates to its Office API (and SlideMagic made some changes to its server), and as a result, the SlideMagic PowerPoint add-in starts working a lot better.
The SlideMagic PowerPoint add-in is especially useful for users who download PowerPoint templates from the SlideMagic web site. Most of you are people who were subscribers to the legacy template store (RIP). Since PowerPoint conversions are a pro feature of SlideMagic, the add-in is only useful for pro subscribers.
What has changed?
The add-in now remembers your login details across PowerPoint files No need to constantly log in (again).
More importantly (thank you Microsoft), the SlideMagic add-in now adds slides straight into your existing PowerPoint presentation
The add-in is still an alpha phase, and things are tested for the moment in the online PowerPoint environment. I will submit it for another go for Microsoft approval to get it working with PowerPoint desktop versions as well.
Here is how to install the add-in:
Download the file slidemagic.xml from this link
Log in to your online Microsoft 365 account, click PowerPoint, and open a new presentation
Select “insert”, then “add-ins”
Select “my add-ins”, then “upload my add -in” in the top of the window (it is not available in the Microsoft store yet)
Select the slidemagic.xml file you just download and upload it
Go back to the '“home” ribbon
The add-in is installed. To use it:
Click the SlideMagic button and the side panel loads
Enter your log in details
Search for a template, and click the design you like
Click “insert” and the slide should appear in your PowerPoint presentation
While the slide is a perfect conversion from SlideMagic, you are obviously missing out on the customization features that make SlideMagic stand out from other presentation apps.
Below are the screenshots of the installation process
Since v2.6.18, SlideMagic has in-app onboarding tutorials. Click the ‘?’ icon in the bottom left of the app, and you will be taken around the features of the screen that is currently active. The slide edit screen also covers the general navigation inside the app. Next to the edit screen, there are page walkthroughs for the story, settings, presenter, image/icon search, and template search screens.
There is still some formatting to do, and the tutorial needs a more prominent position when you start SlideMagic for the very first time, but all in all, very useful I think. The real-time examples work much better than static tutorial pages, and now, the tutorial will always be up to date with the user interface (which is still changing now and then).
Photo by Zoltan Fekeshazi on Unsplash
I made the user interface for speaker notes a bit clearer in version 2.6.12 of SlideMagic. The mysterious bullet point icon at the bottom of the slide has been replaced with a simple text link. Click and you will see a big and bold overlay over the slide where you can add your notes.
Speaker notes will show up in the presenter view window when you present the slides and are only visible to you the presenter, not to the audience. On a Zoom call, share the audience window to the video call participants, while you keep an eye on your private presenter view with important reminders of the points you want to make when presenting the slide.
In SlideMagic, you can edit your speaker notes also in this presenter view window. This is not only great for last minute fixes of your story, but also gives you a platform to edit the flow of your story slide by slide. Increase the size of your presenter view window, and click through your presentation. You see a small thumb of your slide, an even smaller one of the next slide up, and a big text box to write down your points.
When you return to the normal view of the slide, you will see that the speaker note edit link has changed colour, to remind you that there are speaker notes in this slide. This is important when you share .magic files with other users, because they will be able to read those speaker notes as well. (This prevents you from sending “Better not share our 50% churn with investors in the first presentation with investors if they do not ask for it….” to well, an investor attending your first presentation)
When convert a SlideMagic .magic file to PowerPoint .pptx (a ‘pro’ feature), the speaker notes will be transferred as well. (Of course, a PDF conversion will have no speaker notes.)
I have made more improvements to the SlideMagic user interface. Is is now easier to select multiple cells, especially in fine grids.
If you select a column marker at the top of the slide, all boxes in your slide that “touch|” the column will be become selected, and you can apply formatting to them in one go (for example, make them all blue).
The same applies for rows, click a row marker, and all relevant boxes in the row line up.
Finally, you can select whole areas of boxes by first clicking a top-left element, then clicking a bottom-right element, and SlideMagic will light up all the boxes that are in between. See the example below.
SlideMagic works with fixed positions for slide titles, subtitles, footnotes, and logos. Each slide looks organised, consistent, and the same.
Some slides call out for a slightly differently layout. Tracker pages for example. A simple text box that sites right in the middle of the screen. Up until now, SlideMagic would push these text boxes a bit down or to the right because of the required space for the slide title.
With a very simple check mark, I now created the option to remove titles from the slide on a slide-by-slide basis. It is a tiny adjustment to the user interface that can improve the look of layouts significantly. I am still putting a high hurdle when it comes to complicating SlideMagic. This is definitely not a complication!
While the user interface adjustment is easy, behind the scenes, there is a lot going on. Removing the the titles from a slide requires recropping of all the images on a slide. With SlideMagic’s new automatic cropping algorithm, this has now become possible. Imagine doing this for a slide with 40 client logos in a regular presentation design software, after which you come to the conclusion that the slide looked better with a title: re-cutting, re-cropping, re-distributing 40 images again. In SlideMagic, this is a button click.
You can check out the new features as of version 2.6.9
Photo by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash
For years I tried to resist the pressure from lawyers to fill every slide with legal disclaimers. They do not look very pretty. But SlideMagic aims to be practical and as of version 2.6.8, you can do so, if you have to.
To make them still look OK:
I made the font really small, in all caps, so the disclaimer looks more like some sort of a document id
All disclaimers are exactly the same and at exactly the same place
The placement of the disclaimer changes based on what sort of aspect ratio / slide layout you are using
Should you put disclaimers? (Warning, I am not a lawyer). There are certain situations where you probably should. Certain confidentiality agreements state that information needs to be marked as being confidential to be covered by the agreement.
But, if there is no such agreement in place, I am not sure how much leverage you have if people are sharing pages despite all the scary warnings on the page. Also, if you are using slides with a big TED talk or product launch, the whole world can see them, making the disclaimers pretty useless.
Most investors do not sign NDAs, and you actually you want the junior VC to forward your pages to a partner in the firm. Assume that when you send your slides to investors, there can be leaks, so be careful what you put in there. In most cases the actual content of your super secret technology will not make the difference when it comes to evaluating your pitch deck in the early stages of the investment process.
So, consult your lawyer, push back if she insists, and give in if she has a reasonable argument.
Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash
