SlideMagic Blog

I speculated a few years ago about the potential of having a projector with you in your pocket. By that time, it was not yet possible to run presentations off your smartphone. Things have changed now and devices like the Popvideo pico projector for iPhone (comic sans alert) might be on their way to becoming a replacement for the crappy VGA corporate overhead projectors in conference rooms (the keynote hall is still too much of a challenge). I think there will never be a real market for projecting confidential business presentations on the walls of public places such as cafes. It might spur a new generation of graffiti or performance artists though…

I think that wireless video technology will transform home entertainment and the corporate conference room. In the latter, hopefully we might see the end of battles with laptops, cables, and projectors before we can get down to showing our presentation. It will take time before the last conference room is Airplay enabled, but I am keen to accelerate things.

It is already possible to Airplay iPhone and iPad screens on your Apple TV, but font issues still complicate the transfer of presentation files from computers to mobile devices. Currently, Airplay mirroring is not supported for Macs. The next version of Mac OSX will allow Airplay mirroring of Mac screens wirelessly to your Apple TV.

If you cannot wait, well, there is an app for that. Airparrot enables sending your Mac screen wirelessly to you Apple TV ($10). The app has many customization features, allowing you to adjust the performance/quality trade off and select which screens you want to transfer, or even which apps. You can switch off the cursor.

Still we are not yet living in the world of 1-click Airplaying of video. Television screens have a lower resolution than computer screens. So before using the app, you need to downgrade your Mac display to 1280x800, the closest to my Apple TV 1280x720 resolution. After that some fiddling with the screen remote to get the right aspect ratio. The resulting screen sharpness is OK, but not the pin-sharp feel you get from watching an HD movie. It is perfectly fine to play presentation slides (which are often 1024x768), but less than optimal for other applications.

I am switching my own introduction presentation to iPad/iPhone, leaving my laptop home as a I go to meetings and instead bringing a small iOS to VGA converter cable with me (Airplaying the presentation to a big screen only works in my own office for the moment). I would recommend this to anyone who constantly needs to have her pitch/sales presentation ready to go.

As a result, I am trying all possible ways to view slides on my iPad. Only Keynote users have a perfect solution (Keynote), if you use other formats it is still compromising. In my case for example, I need PowerPoint to show example presentations that I designed a while ago. And a second complication is that I use a few custom fonts…

So here are your options, I use Dropbox to sync my files, it is still a lot more convenient than iCloud.

1. Keynote to Keynote.  Straightforward and simple. Download in Dropbox, tick open in Keynote and you are all set. When you are in presenter mode, you get a preview of the next slide on your iPad, while the audience just sees the current slide on the projector. Only works with standard fonts that are installed on the iPad.
2. PowerPoint to Keynote. This works surprisingly well (if you use standard fonts). Download the PowerPoint file in Dropbox, tap open in Keynote and you have a file which is 95% OK. However, I am a perfectionist, and the 5% needs to be right as well.
3. SlideShark is iPad app specifically designed for presenting slides. You can upload PowerPoint files to their server, or tap a dropbox or email link and tell the iPad to open the file in SlideShark. The interface is nice, with the option to move randomly between slide tiles (which the audience cannot see) to break the lineair flow of a deck. SlideShark preserves animations in your slide. Using a special font requires a request to SlideShark technical support to install it in the data center. Unlike Keynote, SlideShark does not support the standard Apple fonts (such as Helvetica) SlideShark is not yet retina-optimized I think, the image looks slightly hazy on my screen, but I am sure an update will follow soon. The app has still some childhood diseases at the moment but it could be a clear winner in the future as the team there seems to working hard to make it work among larger competitors who are less focussed iPad presenting (i.e., Microsoft).
4. PDF to Adobe Reader for iPad. Convert your PowerPoint file to PDF on your desktop, download it via Dropbox and select to open it in Adobe’s Reader app(free). Fonts come out perfectly. The display is crystal clear, and the Adobe Reader app for iPad has a good full screen mode (unlike other document readers). Obviously PDF does not support animations
5. PowerPoint to Adobe CreatePDF for iPad. The Adobe CreatePDF app works reasonably well for me (I do not understand all the 1-star ratings on iTunes), but (and it is a big but), only if you use standard fonts (and are willing to invest $10) and your deck does not have animations.

I would love to use hand drawn graphics in my presentation, but I never got to drawing and sketching on a computer. Any tools without a direct screen feedback loop (the mouse, drawing pads, and even the Wacom Inkling) simply do not work for me, and I think a screen like this are very expensive and generate additional clutter in my workspace.

The iPad could solve this, because it has a touch-sensitive screen. As a result, hundreds of drawing apps have popped up in the app store. Drawing apps are different from note take apps. The latter require wrist protection, a good way to organize notes. Drawing apps require brushes, color, pens. Like with writing apps, most drawing apps come loaded with features that just confuse me.

Hence, I was happy to discover Paper by 53, a minimalist drawing app (one of the readers pointed it out to me in a my recent review of iPad note taking apps). Paper just cut down the drawing tools to the bare essentials, and the result is actually good I think. The app is free, but this version comes with one drawing tool: the ink pencil, if you want to get a pencil, a marker, a pen and a paint brush (water colors) it will set you back $8 in in-app purchases.

The pencil is the tool I actually use most. There is a big drawing problem with the iPad screen: it is not pressure sensitive, and varying stroke width is the key feature what makes writing with an ink pen so great. Paper solved this with adjusting the stroke with depending on your speed as you move the pen over the screen. More confident, fast strokes, will appear bolder. (The pen tool works the other way around, moving it slowly creates heavy ink, moving it fast produces a thin line). I love the simple cartoon style sketches that this app produces, and I am looking out for a first client situation where I can try out a cartoon-style presentation (like the one below) for real.

If you work alone in a room (or are willing to use headphones) you can lighten up your design work with some nice music in the background. I have made a complete u-turn on this, starting off with requiring library-like silence to concentrate.

Not all music is suitable for work. Dominant lyrics, or tunes that stick in your head do not work. Music that is so slow that it puts you to sleep is also not ideal. Audio advertising make your office feel like a car repair shop. And the worst of all, repetition is annoying (“hey here is that same sone again for the fifth time”).

The repetition argument pretty much kills the traditional CD option, and even your personal iTunes library will be exhausted soon. Most of all, your personal music purchases of the past are unlikely to be suited for work music.

Internet streaming apps are the solution. Spotify is great, but it requires you to find the right (long) playlist that fits your work requirements. And that is difficult. Pandora is another solution. The genre or artist radio stations are good, but also here you run out of new music. After playing the cool jazz radio station for 2 days you start recognizing the songs.

So, the app I love is Songza. It has far less choice in terms of songs, but it has a treasure of playlists for any occasion you can think of, including work: acoustic, jazz, electronic. Unlike Pandora, the songs are curated by human experts rather than automatic algorithms.

I am continuing my experiment to create a completely paperless creative workflow to increase my mobility. Until now, I had to settle in my creative corner, have my pencils around, have my paper around, before I could get in the mood to do serious design work. I reviewed note taking apps here, now it is the turn of calculators.

Whenever I design a presentation, I almost always have a calculator open on my desk. I design all my data charts by hand, the old fashioned way, doing the final step completely analogue to make sure that resulting slide is really the very best to convey the specific message I want to get across. The calculator is used to calculate the % breakdowns, and to do the final check whether the whole thing adds up. Small calculation errors can distract the audience and undermine the credibility of your analytical work. (I she cannot get the numbers in the chart to add up, what about the underlying spreadsheets?)

So, over the past decades I have used the famous HP 12C as my sole calculator. First in hardware form, then as an app on my iPhone. Since spreadsheets arrived in the early 1990s, I have no need anymore for sophisticated NPV calculations on a calculator. I was simply used to the user interface of the machine, to such an extend that I replaced it for about EUR 100 with a new one a few years ago.

The iPhone HP 12C works, but is not perfectly convenient. I always fiddle with the landscape-only orientation, and the buttons are a bit too small to be convenient. So the iPad solves at the least the button size issue. Like note taking apps, there are an infinite amount of calculator apps available for the iPad (including the build in one).

Handwritten notes are very important in presentation design. I use 2 kinds:

1. A very small note book with a beautiful leather cover to take meeting notes
2. The back pages of old print out for slide design (I take more pages out than I add, the pile is shrinking fast)

For writing I use my favorite pencil: the Lamy 2000 (review).

Let’s look at application 1 first: meeting notes

Although I love my luxury micro note book, there is a big problem with analogue note taking: finding stuff. Since you write sequentially, and often use poor handwriting, it is hard to access notes that are part of a specific project (I can have more than 10 things going on at the same time).

Digital note taking on an iPad can solve this: simply create a note book for every project.

The key problem is the iPad-hand interface. Steve Jobs always was against using a styles, he correctly reminded us that we have 10 of them already. That is true for navigation, but not for writing large pieces of text (fast). The biggest problem is seeing what you do. Big fingers are getting in the way of your eyes, leading to illegible scribbles. And after a while you get tired of holding your finger straight. So there is no escaping from a style.

An iPad stylus needs to have a fat tip with a soft surface, mirroring the texture of a human finger. The resulting line can still be highly thin though, getting drawn at the center of impact of the soft tip. To show this effect, see fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld sketch drawings live on stage during the LeWeb 2011 conference in Paris last year (skip to 19:50).

Clients that run conservative IT infrastructures (usually the larger enterprises) still have a cap of around 10MB on the size of an email attachment. As presentations contain more images, file sizes are getting increasingly larger. Over the past years I have been cropping and compressing to keep file sizes in check, but I think we have finally reached the time to get rid of the email attachment as the preferred way to send files across.

Solutions such as Dropbox provide a very convenient alternative to the email attachment, send a download link to a file, or sync a file both on your hard drive and the hard drive of your colleague.

Now that 10MB is no longer an issue, we can go to 100MB and beyond and this introduces incredible design freedom.

1. Put images in at full HD resolution, keep the areas that you cropped out to change a slide design in the future, and have the option to produce very high-grade print material from your working document. There is no need anymore to do destructive compression to your source file. With new devices such as the new iPad with retina screen resolutions going to more than 2000 pixels this becomes essential. A 700 pixel image will look OK on a crappy VGA overhead projector, but will look fuzzy and unprofessional on a tablet
2. Embed HD videos right into the presentation file. No more linking, saving files in the same directory and worrying about whether things work. Over the past months I have become convinced of the power of short 30 second videos in presentations. You could even start replacing background stills of a landscape with a looping video that show a gentle breeze going through the tree tops with some birds flying by.

I am continuing my research in mobile presentation platforms, with very useful input from you guys.

Until now, the Keynote versus PowerPoint battle has been a feature debate. While Keynote has some better features in some instances, they are unlikely to be enough to switch people over who just invested years in getting to grips with one user interface.

Mobile devices might change that.

There are two types of presentation decks. The everyday presentation is a PowerPoint file that is used in corporates to make business decisions; it is not really meant for presentation, rather it is a more visual substitute for a word processor. The second one is the key company pitch, sales, or fund raising presentation. You use it all the time. You perfect it all the time with small changes. You use it in different settings, mostly for audiences outside the company.

I would argue that by now, it is better to have that crucial presentation in Keynote than in PowerPoint. Why? Mobile devices, and the integration of PowerPoint with iPads is non-existent, while by now Keynote has pretty decent mobile apps.

Pulling out a laptop in a coffee shop to go through a deck is unnatural. Flipping on your iPad is not. An iPad could also be a powerful replacement of the PC + clicker combination that we use for conference room, or even on-stage presentations.

One scenario. You sitting at the reception of a venture capitalist waiting to be picked up. On your iPhone you click through your slides to do a final mental rehearsal. Ah, a typo, a quick fix. You walk into the conference room and one of the VC partners is late. Instead of an on-screen presentation you tell your story verbally, while pointing at a key chart on your iPad when necessary. The second VC partner walks into the room, and immediately you Airplay the presentation onto the conference room screen. You quickly repeat the main points you made by picking off a few slides from your iPad (because of presenter mode, the audience does not see you browsing through tiles) and finish the discussion with the detailed financials, and the use of the funds that you are trying to raise.

The iPad could be the ultimate device for presenting on-stage, solving many problems I have blogged about before:

• It can create a dual-screen view: the presenter sees a different screen than the audience (timer, next slide coming up etc.). Now only PowerPoint and Keynote support this with dual monitors. The iPad can create it instantly for any application, including Adobe Reader, enabling presenting from PDFs
• It can create a non-lineair presentation interface (like Prezi). On your iPad are all the slides in thumbnail view, and you can pick them on the spot without disturbing the audience screen.

There is a real jungle out there of iPhone/iPad presentation apps and none of them get it right. None of them have the thumbnail slide mode, and no one has found a good way to work around the iPad’s font limitations (images instead of text?).

This last point is essential if the iPhone/iPad moves from being a remote control directing a computer to becoming the device that powers the project itself.

Has anyone found the ideal iPad presentation app?