Finding the right portrait image

Today was another day of template building, I am reaching the point where the SlideMagic app starts to contain more slides than the SlideMagic template store that I host with Shopify.

I did some work on finding good portrait shots today. Although now there are many free photo sites around with abundant amount of images of people, it is still tricky to find the right photos to use in your presentation. Here are some of the filters I apply subconsciously as I go through hundreds and hundreds of images at high speed:

• Too much stock photo: you know what I mean

• Clothing mismatch: too fancy dress, very light outfit in a cold environment

• Trying too hard to pose

• Artistic shots of people who look unhappy, depressed, beautiful, but not for a business presentation

• Shots of people who look unnaturally happy

• A background that is too recognisable

• A screen with a message that is too recognisable, grabs too much attention

• Too pretty, cutesy

• Weird posing

• Trying too hard

• Background mismatch (a church, the Sahara) while checking your phone

• An outdated phone (this image was taken 15 years ago)

• Background too busy to add text, other visual elements

• The list goes on

Hopefully SlideMagic will save you the time I spent to find the right images.

P.S. For those who are interested in the cause of yesterday’s mystery bug that made items disappear in the small thumbnails on the left of the screen. Well, flipping an image (which I did on that particular slide) is a time consuming CPU operation, the computer starts it, but then goes on doing other things in parallel, one of which is scrolling the selected slide thumbnail in the visible part of the window (you see it sitting just at the bottom). The scroll stops the other slide rendering operations. And unlike pretty much anything in Javascript, there is no event to catch and manage this. A small 0.1s delay when needed solved the issue for now. That was 1 hour of yesterday’s day :-)

Photo by Baylee Gramling and Photo by Lindbergh Paimalan on Unsplash on Unsplash

More template slides

I am working hard on improving the template database at the moment. A re-write of the code on my server dramatically increased the speed at which I can add slides. It is fun to see it working: get a slide idea, quickly (hey, it is SlideMagic) create it, save, button, and boom: the slide shows up in search queries.

I am adding a lot of image slides at the moment, some of which are a bit cliche, but they should be part of any template database. The other effort goes into strategy consulting frameworks. Here I need to simplify many of them to make them fit into the SlideMagic philosophy. Some might say that they look too simplistic and less sophisticated. I would say that they are a lot easier to read, and a lot, lot, lot quicker to make.

Careful readers can observe the small glitches :-) Why is on that one slide, is that billboard not rendering in story mode, but it does in edit mode, and the same billboard renders in story mode perfectly fine on another slide...

What to do with 7 boxes?

Any slide that has a prime number of boxes on it higher than 5 creates a layout challenge. One, three, or even five boxes can still work, but more, it becomes cluttered.

Yes, can lay out boxes according to mathematical shapes. A heptagon distributes everything evenly. But it is a pain to figure the exact spacing out, but the more important drawback is the amount of slide space you lose. Beautifully arranged shapes that nobody can read. That is the reason why in SlideMagic, I did not even bother to put these types of shapes in.

So what to do? A few suggestions.

• Do you really need a slide with 7, 11, or 13 boxes? The best solution is to cut the thing up in 7 , 11, or 13 stand-alone slides that just make one point.

In some cases there might be no avoiding (for example when you negotiate a contract or some other deal that has 7 key agreement points).

• The obvious solution is to keep things simple and straight: just list the bullets

• You can do what this YouTube instructor did: add an 8th box to make the slide symmetrical. It could work in most cases, I would not give the design decision away though, but find a meaningful extra point

• You can use the bullet points as some sort of tracker, speak very briefly about it, then click through to the next slide that discusses the point in detail

• Maybe one point is more important than all the others, so you can give it more space

• Or, you can use another format such as an irregular collage, to remind the audience at the end of all the things you spoke about

My preferred option is probably the last one: 7 individual slides for each trend, then an overview to recap everything quickly.

The above slides were quickly put together in SlideMagic 2.0, I put them in a .magic file here (watch that extension), beta users can load and edit them in the app.

App update: V22

Earlier beta versions had a 2020 expiration date, I uploaded V22 to the server that should install automatically. This version also includes lots of performance improvements and bug fixes, including how the app responds to going back and forth in full screen mode, and right click context menus.

Photo by Jeremy Lapak on Unsplash

When you got your story really memorised

Some more learning from last week’s music performance. When you think you have something memorised, you actually still have a long way to go.

Here is the process I went through with a pretty simple song, still it took time:

1. Hit the right chords when reading the chord letters on a piece of paper

2. Hit the right chords when starting the song from scratch, without paper

3. Consistently getting the chords inversions and finger positioning right (rather than making them up each time you remember to place a chord)

4. Being able to do the above with random interruptions, without starting from the start: a mistake (by you or a band member), a quick start-stop to rehearse a certain piece

5. Not thinking at all about chords anymore, just hitting the right thing based on the lyrics, music you hear around you.

When you wing a story on the fly, prompted by a slide that you see on the projector, you are at stage 1 when it comes to presentation preparation, and have 4 more steps to go.

Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash

Getting your focus before a presentation

This weekend and family and me joined a professional group of musicians to give a performance on stage. It was interesting to watch how the band leader made sure all of us delivered the best of our abilities, all which apply to the world of delivering presentations as well:

• The confidence boost to the singer who wakes up with a sore throat the day of the performance: reminding her (based on decades of experience) that when the body has to perform, it will (and it did.

• Spotting and eliminating small logistics hick ups that do not matter in a rehearsal but can kill the flow of a live performance. Have water available to clear dry throats, making sure nobody trips over cables, and pulls out cables of instruments, where do people stand and move, where do people go when they are not part of a song, how do transitions between songs happen.

• And finally, a small rerun of the set lists in a quiet room. Just focusing on the list of songs (which you already know) for a second is like rerunning a 30 minute rehearsal in your head, the mind gets the right focus.

Image credit: @yulesh

Expanding the template database

SlideMagic 2.0 has almost reached the point where I am happy with the features for a first release (icon and image search went in last week). Now it is time to focus attention again to what will make SlideMagic stand out: templates for presentations.

I have started to add slides with images to the template database, inspired by the slides that are for sale in the PowerPoint template store. This is also a good stress test to see how the app with big files full of images.

Work in progress, this will take a bit of time to get right.

Soon: non-blocking print, PDF/PPT conversion

Over the next coming days there will be another update to SlideMagic 2.0: CPU-intensive tasks such as converting a presentation to images, PDF or PowerPoint format, or preparing a file for the printer will no longer block the main process. I am getting the hang of managing dozens of different processes in parallel.

In version 1.0 in SlideMagic, we were dreading doing these intensive computations on our server, it would take a lot of processing power if the app were to scale (hence the imperfect solution of emailing back PowerPoint conversion a few hours later, far too late for the meeting you actually needed the slides in).

In version 2.0, this is no longer an issue, since SlideMagic uses the enduser machine to do the hard work. This fundamental architecture will enable me to scale up with less investment, but more importantly, a smooth user experience as everything happens instantly on your machine.

Photo by Alexander Popov on Unsplash

Soon: integrated images and icons in SlideMagic 2.0

I am working to integrate images and icons into SlideMagic 2.0. The workflow for both in current presentation design tools is seriously broken:

• Search for an image

• Save it on your hard drive

• Find it on your hard drive

• (If relevant : waiting to upload it again to your online tool)

• Crop and change colour (especially challenging for SVG icons), can be very slow and cumbersome in online image editors

• Get the image/icon to line up with the rest of your slides

• Finding the link to the photographer you need to give credit to (if required)

All of this can soon happen directly in SlideMagic 2.0, which in turn can churn out a perfect conversion to PowerPoint if needed.

Printing is working

It was a painful process with lots of trial and error and wasted trees, but SlideMagic 2.0 beta users can print their presentations as of v2.19 without using the PDF conversion bypass. I am still working on improving the resolution without maxing out on memory, and fixing small formatting issues (exact centering of the slides), but the basics are there.

For those who are interested. In the beginning of my coding project I was cursing this parallel processing of lines of codes, no I actually start using it to my advantage by speeding things up. PowerPoint and PDF conversion will soon move to a background process.

Photo by James Pond on Unsplash

Vacation picture evening!

You remember those evenings in the 1980s, where a family would invite you to come and see their vacation snaps that they put on the 35mm slide carrousel in a dark living room. Sixty minutes of “then we did this, then this happened, then that projected on the wall with the art replica temporarily removed.

The host family had great fun and finally could use the equipment they had bought 6 months ago. The guests, less so. For them, the images were not linked to actual experiences and memories, a picture of a car with a flat tire, is well, a picture of a flat tire.

It is always good to take a step back and asking yourself whether you are inviting your colleagues to this type of event when you update them about the status of your project.

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

2 years in 2 minutes

In case you have not seen the 2-minute speech of the New Zealand prime minister:

Absolutely incredible to watch this @jacindaardern video be pinged around the world. In the last 48 hours, it's seemingly gone everywhere from the UK to Pakistan, and has even gone viral in Lebanon - becoming another tool for protestors to push for change pic.twitter.com/7RyJvywHjJ

— Ashleigh Stewart (@Ash_Stewart_) November 3, 2019

Obviously, the objective of this speech is not to get you to remember all the stats, it is 2 minutes of one message: “I did a lot’. It is very effective though, and she must have gone through several practice runs to get the take right.

Now; if you take the same information load, allocate 45 minutes of time, improvise the delivery, and replace the flashing words by full-length bullet points, you get a more common update presentation. Which one do you prefer?

Printing presentations in 2019

I don’t think many people are still printing presentations in 2019. The one exception: bankers pitching to institutional investors. The latter still like to flip along (or ahead) with the presentation and make notes in the margin.

Still, I want SlideMagic 2.0 to be fully rounded app, so I start the work on its print function. Printing is often ignored by many application development frameworks. The feature is not that important, it is tricky to develop and get right, but it has to be done.

A positive side effect is that I am coming up with a better way to convert presentations to PDF without the need to rely on open source libraries, and I can soon support conversions as a parallel process that no longer will block the main application process (something that can be annoying especially if you used large images).

(Beta testers can get around the current lack of the print feature by converting to PowerPoint or PDF and then print in those apps).

Photo by James Pond on Unsplash

Bar versus column charts

Sparked by this tweet:

Hmm. Might need a log scale on this one. pic.twitter.com/Qgn2GLRWPG

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) November 6, 2019

My guideline:

• Columns to show trends over time. The shape mimics that of a line chart, you don’t need much space for the column labels (usually years, or months)

• Columns for breakdowns. More horizontal space for complicated labels, and a stacked column is a more natural format than stacked bars.

• Bars to rank things. The shape mimics a “top 10” top to bottom list, and you can make more space for labels that usually describe things

In this case: bars are better than columns.

Photo by Sophie on Unsplash

Back to Helvetica

SlideMagic slides always looked a bit different because of the Roboto Condensed font. A recognisable style, plus a narrow font that can hold a lot of text on one line. In the latest update for beta testers, I am putting Helvetica/Arial back as the default, making Roboto a second choice.

I see many users using SlideMagic as a starting point for a conversion to PowerPoint, as most of their colleagues have (yet) no idea with SlideMagic is. SlideMagic files with Roboto in them will gave unpredictable results for users who do not know how to install custom fonts on their machine.

Usability is #1. Hence, the switch, but with an option to fall back on Roboto that can get saved as your default font in the settings tab of the app.

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Unsplash

Starting a brand overhaul (once again)

Slowly, slowly, I am starting up overhaul my website and branding once more. The custom presentation design business site has been taken down, marketing for SlideMagic 1.0 has been hidden in a menu, and I started to display a landing page for SlideMagic 2.0.

Sunsetting 2 businesses on which you have worked for years (even more than a decade) feels a bit strange, I remember worrying about SEO and other things, while I am now switching off the whole thing in one click.

All to make space for 2.0.

Auto-update is working again

The update server is back up, now with improved security. Beta testers will have version 2.1.17 installed automatically, with bug fixes and improved stability.

Auto-update temporarily closed

I am beefing up the security and code protection of SlideMagic 2.0, and have temporarily taken down the automatic update server. Beta testers who want to get their hands on the latest version should log in with their account at cloud.slidemagic.com/beta and download the latest version manually. I am working hard to get everything back up soon.

...And more app updates

I am focusing on increasing the template database and in the process encounter more ways to make working with SlideMagic faster, and slides prettier. After the past days:

• Various bug fixes, and code cleanups. I can now laugh at some of the code I wrote at the very beginning of this project, what was I thinking…

• A proper way to deal with text overflow in boxes, things look professional now when font sizes are getting to big

• The grid bars now light up when you select shapes

• A allowed bolding of text with CTRL-CMD B, unlike bullet points, I think this actually does add something to the slide (not yet reflected in PowerPoint and PDF conversions, I might have to write a text block parser to make this happen).

• Building on bold text, I made the overall font thinner

• And I added slide subtitles as a fixed feature to each slide template.

To be continued

App update

SlideMagic 2.0 beta users will have their app updated over the coming days with a few tweaks and improvements, mostly the result of me now using the app in earnest for the expansion of the template database.

• I gave up on insisting that you cannot change the layout of the title page of the presentation. Page 1 still looks like it did before out of the box, but you can now change it, delete it, move it, like any other slide in the presentation. Whatever you do to it, the design will be 100% consistent with the other slides in the deck though. Page one is important to brand your presentation, and I was imposing too many restrictions on my users. The side effect of this is that removing the need to distinguish between page 1 and regular pages I could simplify the app code massively (= deleting many, many lines of code). Legacy SlideMagic 1.0 presentations will be converted automatically.

• I removed the ability to edit slide titles in story mode. Initially I thought it would be a useful way to edit headlines of your slides all together. Now in use, I found that it actually confuses the story user interface.

• I perfected drag and drop of slides, now also across multiple presentation windows (something that is hard to do in browser-based applications such as Google Slides). As result the clipboard in story view was no longer needed. You can now also drag, copy, delete, move slides in the small thumbnail strip at the side of the main edit screen. There is still work to do here (dragging multiple slides for example)

• I implemented right-click context menus throughout the presentation, enabling me to declutter the user interface by removing icons that are no longer needed.

• Popup menus enable you to work with very fine grids now, as I no longer need to render lots of icons.

• Popups also solve user interface conflicts between drawing connector arrows and combining/splitting shapes

To be continued.