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

The SlideMagic template bank now has an "unlimited" number of slides

The latest version of the SlideMagic app (download) now has a feature that I wanted to implement for years: automatically generated slide templates.

The basic set of SlideMagic templates are closely related to my consulting background: lists, tables, frameworks, 2x2s, graphs, diagrams, etc. This set will grow into the thousands, but it still relatively small when it comes to the universe of slides.

There is a big long tail of slide designs that are impossible to design and store on a server: slides with backgrounds of an image: cities, buildings, buckets, cars, roads. It was already possible to search online for free images in SlideMagic, but now I took a step further.

When you hit a search inside the app, first SlideMagic will serve you its own templates that best match your search criteria. But then, the app will add automatically generated layouts with relevant images after that. These slides do not sit on the server, they are generated on the fly. In the screen shots below, you can spot the break between the two types of slides, but you need to look carefully.

This feature is only available inside the SlideMagic and not yet implemented on the web site. I am just starting to scratch the surface of all of this, as usual: work on 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.

Chart makeover: where do people get infected with COVID-19

Israel is experiencing a very strong second wave of the virus. Its health ministry recently published data about where people get infected.

This graph does not tell the entire picture, I tried making a quick slide in SlideMagic:

What did I add?

• Providing the overall context: for many patients it is not known where they are infected, and many get infected at home (which are probably secondary infections)

• There is still important data missing. The most important one is how many people in total actually visit a place. Millions of people visit schools, thousands probably visit gyms and places

• We need to understand the impact on secondary infections (how big are the typical households that these people are coming from).

• Then there is the question about impact to society…

This SlideMagic slide is free, you can download it here. It is clearly an example of an analysis slide, rather than a visual to be presented to a large audience. While I am not a big fan of stretched 16:9 layouts, in this case I had to go for it to create space.

PS. My opinion re. the strong second wave in Israel? Yes, Israel got the virus under control and then reopened too quickly (school were the main source of infection initially). But, in the end I believe any country re-opening will go through the same process, may just a bit slower. I think Israel is 1-2 months ahead of other countries re-opening.

Working to add waterfall charts to SlideMagic

Waterfall charts are always an absolute pain to make. As my coding skills increase, I am getting more confident to add trickier things to SlideMagic ( tricker in terms of coding, not in terms of user interface). So, I have started to work on adding waterfall charts to SlideMagic. Below a screenshot of my development machine.

They should be in line with all the other data charts in SlideMagic, line up perfectly with the grid to make it easy to add data labels and incorporate them into the overall slide composition.

For many corporate users of SlideMagic, the killer feature might be the conversion of these simple waterfalls in a fully editable spreadsheet in PowerPoint/Excel.

Work in progress…

Update: the latest version of SlideMagic now as the waterfall functionality. It should work great in the app. PowerPoint conversions works as well except for the data labels. Let me know if you encounter any issues.

Photo by Robert Lukeman on Unsplash

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.

Using heat maps in your presentation

This is a neat visualisation of the COVID outbreak in Florida:

Why does it work?

1. It uses colour intensity to introduce another dimension of data in a column diagram: time, number of cases, and age range.

2. The colours are nicely chosen so the chart gives the impression of some sort of fire being lit (which is unfortunately the case).

These charts cannot easily be created in PowerPoint, this one is generated by some code. But you could give it a go in PowerPoint.

• Take a standard column chart in PowerPoint

• Make all the data series have the same value, the age brackets you want to use

• Set the gap between the columns to zero

• And now comes the hard part: manually add different colours to each data point. To select a data point click it twice in quick succession (one click will give you the entire data series wiping out your detailed painting effort in one go)

Here is a quick search for heat maps in SlideMagic, I added one design that sort of resembles the COVID chart. You can see how the new slide layout with the side title I introduced a few days ago comes in handy to create more vertical space for data.

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

Embarrassment...

While cleaning up an old computer, I came across a version of SlideMagic from probably 6 months ago. Back then I thought this was just about as good as it can get, comparing it now to version 2.4.3, I am almost embarrassed to have even released this. I hope I feel the same way about the current version in 6 months.

Only now, I am getting close to the feature set that was in my brainstorm notebook from almost four years ago. I remember coming up with most what is in SlideMagic 2.0 during Web Summit in Lisbon in 2016…

Things still to fix are:

• Connector editing (it works, but it is not intuitive and efficient enough)

• Making sure that previews of template slides show up in your own personal slide branding, rather than SlideMagic blue (without wasting a huge amount of bandwidth and/or processing power)

Photo by Abigail Keenan 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

Borders!

I succumbed to pressure from some users of SlideMagic and added the ability to put a small border around a shape. In general I am not a big fan of borders (hence my initial hesitation). Most of the time a slide element just looks nicer when its shape is carried by its colour rather than a surrounding line. In nature, things do not have lines around them.

But.

I can see situations where you might need them. Especially when working with a grid of images of irregular sizes on white backgrounds (for example logos). Adding a tiny box around the shape makes the page look more balanced.

After installing the latest version of SlideMagic (V2.3.24), you will see a tick box appear under the colour menu. The tick does what it expects you to do. Let me know what you think, or update me if you find glitches in the .magic file rendering, or in PowerPoint conversion.

I will now also start using this new design element when I add new templates to the SlideMagic slide database.

While we are on user pressure, other requests that are being lobbied hard:

• One, just one, more colour…. Please.

• If we could somehow make something round (not boxy) in your app… Please.

• Yes, I know that the “connectors” are a bit cumbersome at the moment

Let’s see..

Photo by Spencer Davis 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.

The "corona crop" to change the appearance of crowd sizes

A recent tweet:

Can we all stop believing the accuracy of those telephoto-lens "packed" beach/street photos. It's a cheap trick, and one easily done. Below are 2 photos taken by me 20 seconds apart. Change the angle to straight along + crop = corona-tastic looking crowd. pic.twitter.com/AlpHvumW2p

— Ed Fidgeon-Kavanagh (@Clearpreso) June 25, 2020

Why does the crowd look denser in the second image? When you make an extreme zoom in an image your brain loses the context in which the original photo was taken. Images are 2D, so no sense of depth here.

Lessons:

• When news outlets publish images to show crowd sizes, see at what angle they are taken. Drone shots from above are the most reliable

• If you need an image of a crowded street or other public place in your presentation, you can use this effect to your advantage. Download a very high resolution image with a flat camera angle, and apply a big zoom/crop.

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

How to get all the slides...

Many users ask for this. It is possible today to browse slides in the template bank by simply hitting an empty return in the search bank, you get served a dozen of random slides.

Still, I am not making this the core of SlideMagic. “Getting all the slides” is a very PowerPoint-like workflow. In PowerPoint it is hard to customise templates (adding/deleting boxes), which encourages you to eyeball a large number of slides you designed previously and pick the one that closest matches what you need today.

SlideMagic is different for a number of reasons:

• It is super easy to customise templates: no need for eye balling. Simply start with a layout that is vaguely in the right direction and make a few adjustments

• Many slides in the SlideMagic template bank are image-based, which generates a huge number of slides that are only usable for very specific situations. Eye balling to get inspired will take too much time and might give you a headache.

• The database starts to get lots of slides that are almost-duplicates: title pages with different titles, small variants of the same concept. Not good for browsing

In general, the template bank gets too big for browsing, and I am only just getting started….

Photo by HelpStay.com on Unsplash