Fast. Easy. Beautiful.
Yesterday I wrote about how difficult it is to keep your application windows organised across two very large monitors. Colleague Nick Smith pointed me to this neat utility: Divvy. It creates a pop up grid that allows you to position windows quickly. Available for both Windows and Mac OSX. This features should be baked into operating systems as a standard feature.
I broke my laptop screen and was forced to rethink my IT setup. For the first time in 10 years, I went back to a desktop as my main computer: the 27" iMac and will fix up my laptop as a secondary computer for onsite client work or travel. My desktop is also connected to one additional large Thunderbolt display.
The difference between the 5k monitor and the Thunderbolt screen is amazing. After working for 1 day on the new screen, you can't imagine having had to deal with this grainy Thunderbolt monitor for a couple of years. (The Thunderbolt screen is long overdue for an upgrade).
Two big monitors work also better than one big screen and a laptop as a side monitor. Mac OSX is still clunky when dragging large application windows between different size screens. You always had to fiddle and resize windows. Now that the monitors are more or less the same aspect ratio I no longer have that issue.
Still I believe that the fluid window-based operating system where you can resize and position windows where ever you want them creates messy work environments. Mac OSX needs some sort of grid structure where you can snap things into place. Maybe an extension of the new multi-app feature that is now part of iOS.
When going back to desktop you need to budget for one more piece of equipment: a backup battery (UPS). The power goes down, your computer goes down. Apple should have put in a 5 minute battery that enables you to power down the machine orderly in case of a power failure. The latter we tend to have here in Israel in the middle of the summer when air conditioners drive the power grid to its maximum capacity, or in the winter when violent thunderstorms hit power lines.
I like to use one single visual concept as much as I can in a presentation. Two by two matrices, graphs, frameworks, they all require time to absorb by an audience. If you have to through in a new one on every single page, things can get pretty tiring. Management consultants tend to do this, and forget that the audience did not spend 3 months on the project but is hearing the story for the first time.
Luckily common issues in a presentation are often related:
If you can fit all of this in a variant of the same diagram, you will save the audience a lot of time.
Art: Robert Antoine Pichon, Le Pont Aux Anglais, 1905
I now have spent more hours taking notes and sketching with my iPad Pro 9.7 + pencil combo (read the earlier post). Things are still not perfect.
The big issue is instant availability of your canvas. Keep the screen on continuously and you drain your battery in less than an hour. Do auto-power off and you find your self do this for every single scribble you want to make 1) press home button 2) touch id 3) touch canvas to activate the writing surface. The latter is probably an issue in the Evernote Penultimate app, which has 2 modes: One where you view notes, and one where you can edit them.
There is hope though. Most of these issues are solvable, and some even via software. We will get there in the end.
Image from WikiPedia
The presidential campaign is gearing up in the US, and opinion pages and social media posts are full of passionate declarations of support and/or disapproval of a specific candidate. Most of these are not going to convince people to change their mind though. In most cases, the audience and the "presenter" probably agree already, they read the same newspaper, watch the same channel and are friends connected on social media.
To make change, you need to convince the people that are doubters, the people in the centre. You don't do that by implying that supporters of the other side are not very smart or insulting them in other ways.
Think about the doubters, what it the final straw that might convince them to switch sides?
Image from WikiPedia
When there is not much information about a market available, startups sometimes commission new research to dig up the facts and make projections. The end result is often a slide with one number: "Our extensive research shows that the market will be $1,0234,654 in 2020, the full report is too detailed and we won't bore you with it".
Investors are not going to buy this.
Here are some things you can do:
The above is useful when making the presentation, but can also be handy when you brief consultants for a project.
In big presentation days with lots of decks you get the inevitable situation that some slides fit in multiple presentations. Some presenters double them up, and start presenting the slide (after the apology "you have seen/heard this before" as if it was the first time).
Don't. Repetition is boredom. Your audience can/will remember. You have 2 options:
Over the years I have written many reviews of styli and iPad note taking apps on this blog. I am a heavy user of notes:
Up until now, I have not found a good alternative to pencil and paper:
The iPad Pro (I have the 9.7" version) and Apple Pencil changed a lot. I actually use the device now in meetings and leave my note book and pencil at home. I tried Apple Notes, Penultimate, and Paper by 53. Of these, Penultimate suits me best in meetings. Everything syncs to Evernote (they got me locked in), nice and fat pen strokes, and easy to add pages and scroll over your notes. The big issue has now become battery life. Watch out in long meetings where you leave the screen on for a long time.
I got the iPad keyboard cover as well, but like laptops, that setup disturbs the dynamics of the meeting. I find myself using the keyboard for writing blog posts on the road in between meetings.
For brainstorming charts, I prefer Paper by 53. Boxes, circles, straight lines, the user interface is just better. I don't want to buy 2 iPad devices, but my guess is that the big 12" iPad Pro will be superior for creative work. The 9.7 screen feels limiting for big, bold, creative efforts. Maybe I should get 2 devices.
I have been incredibly busy with client work over the past months, but over the summer, I plan to turn my attention back to SlideMagic, my presentation design app. Two ideas have started to form in my head:
Obviously I could also focus on making existing features better: a more accurate PowerPoint conversion, better rendering on iPads for example.
For beta users out there, what do you want to see? You can let me know via jan at slidemagic dot com.
Some interesting reading here by Netflix who analysed how effective icons/tiles of its movies and TV shows were.
While I have been upgrading my phone fairly frequently over the past years, my iPad has pretty stayed the same for a long time. I got the first one with Retina display (the 3 I think), got frustrated with its weight and got a Mini as soon as that one was equipped with a Retina display. Last week, I got an iPad Pro 9.7.
Why? I will be honest, screen size. I subscribe to many iPad magazines in niche categories (mountain biking, synthesizers if you are interested) and these smaller publications do not always have apps that adjust to small screen sizes. At 46, I found them increasingly hard to read.
Also I was curious about the Apple Pencil and keyboard. The big iPad Pro tempted me, but I held out long enough to read the reviews of most users who found its size too bulky. So, here I am with an iPad Pro 9.7.
The first thing that strikes you is the incredible screen this iPad has. My iPhone 6S looks poor next to it. Second is its weight. Feels the same as my old Mini, despite a much larger screen.
The pencil is the first one that actually works for an iPad. Over the years I have tried many, many styli, and always found myself going back to paper. All my slide designs start as a sketch on a piece of paper, I like to make them big, so I burn through many trees in a month. I am hopeful that the pencil will finally end this waste. The real answer will come after a month of use or so. The pencil works nicely in the Apple Notes app, but really shines in the Paper app by 53. The only drawback of the pencil is that there is nowhere to put it. I reviewed a leather designer cover I got for my iPad 3 to carry everything around.
Multi-tasking looks useful: you can now open 2 app windows side by side.
Finally, the keyboard. I never had a problem with typing on their iPad screen, what did bother me was the pop up window for the characters. That is now gone. Attach the keyboard and you have the full screen real estate of the app. I am writing this blog post on my iPad as we "speak".
It is this keyboard that really makes my presentation design app SlideMagic work on an iPad. The text dialogue box is gone. More and more I am starting to think that SlideMagic could actually be the first presentation app that allows you to create slides on a tablet for real.
I will report back after some time for the 10,000 km review
Communication in the work place in general has its problems:
In presentations, the issue is most visible but it is sitting everywhere. People are used to transferring ideas in a dialogue where the recipient asks questions to help her understand what is being said. All this breaks down in one way communication.
Art: Tower of Babel by Pieter Breughel the Elder
It is holocaust memorial day today in Israel. Here is a presentation I created back in 2009:
The eye wants boxes on a slide to be equal in size. That is why I am always battling with the box with the largest amount of text, it determines the shape size and/or font size of all the boxes on the chart. Here you need to be a newspaper front page layout designer/editor and cut down the text of that box carefully without diluting its meaning. It will improve the look of your entire slide.
I really don't like the word "management" for example. You need it a lot in business presentations and has all these wide letters, which makes it hard to fit.
Image from WikiPedia
This chart taken from the Economist shows a nice use of stacked bar charts: 3 variables in one.
Photo taken from the facebook page of the British Royal Family
The main reason to design a new presentation app that is an alternative to PowerPoint (SlideMagic) is the flaw in the windows/mouse-based user interface design that has been with us since the end of the 1980s. Users can drag, move, place, distort, objects as they see fit. Inexperienced designers will get it wrong and put things in the wrong places.
Over my holiday, I have been listening to this Andreessen Horowitz podcast that discusses whether tablets are finally ready to eliminate the laptop:
Some other interesting points that came up:
Image from WikiPedia
I am on vacation with my family at the moment, posting might be a bit unpredictable. Going against good blogging practice, I am not working with a big post content pipeline but rather write entries almost all "live". You read it five minutes after I wrote it. Authentic and raw, but less good at incorporating family holiday schedules. Apologies.
Most presentations have some sort of written summary on the first page. You often almost skip it when presenting live, but it can be important for an important that reads your slide deck at the computer rather than attending a live presentation.
The one thing that I find really hard to summarise are financials. Prose that goes like "sales were x, up y% compared to last quarter but z% versus the same quarter last year at a slightly higher operating margin of v%" makes me totally lose the picture.
Financial journalists fill pages of the Wall Street Journal with this type of texts. And they are upset that it is now possible for an automated bot to do this job: insert a financial table and out comes a perfectly written paragraph. (Robo journalism)
What do I do as a reader? I reconstruct the table back in my head.
So what to do in a presentation? I recommend a super simple written summary on page 1 (sales were up, but profits down), and then a very crisp financial summary table on the next page. Round up numbers, and use colour coding to show what went up or down.
Image from WikiPedia
Presenting slides in front of a big audience is just one application of PowerPoint, and probably not the one that is most commonly used. Here are a few others:
A 1980s presentation design tool ended up being the operating system that power most communication inside a company.
Not every presentation slide is about finding the right image. In my work, I encounter a lot of "layout puzzles": tables or diagrams of boxes that need to convey complex trade-offs and relationships. The challenge is to convey the message simply, without making things too simplistic.
Here are some of the steps I go through:
This might sound like tedious work, but the end result is often a diagram that forms the backbone of your entire presentation.
Image from WikiPedia
