SlideMagic Blog

In between the election news: waterfall charts….

Waterfall charts are a great tool to explain the difference between 2 scenarios. In SlideMagic, they are really easy to create. Below is one I put together quickly with data from Apple’s 2020 Q4 earnings result, and a photo I found using SlideMagic’s built-in Unsplash image search. Notice how I opted for an unusual vertical waterfall, to create more space for the axis labels.

Some people would argue that you could make the chart even clearer by breaking the axes: showing them as ‘5.6’ and ‘4.7’ for example. Yes, it would highlight the deltas better, but in general, I think manipulating axes, well, manipulates the message. The fact that the changes are relatively small to the total is part of the message.

I reshuffled the rows a bit to group the decreases and increases. That makes it more clear in one sense, but less clear in another. Your choice.

\How do you go about making such an analysis? I put my numbers in a Google Sheet that you can view yourself.

1. Enter the data for the 2 comparable quarters in 2 columns. Add the totals as calculations rather than hard-coded numbers to check that you did not make any typos. (The blue cells are the one that I type in, the white ones are calculations).
2. Create space between the 2 columns
3. Pull numbers from the input that you consider drivers. You see that I deviated a bit from the way the input was presented:

I am pushing new updates to the SlideMagic desktop app almost every day. Most of the things I do at the moment are not spectacular new features, but improving the plumbing of the app. I have now created the option to opt in or out of these beta versions (that could have the occasional bug). Users on deadlines for important presentations do not have time to beta test software.

All users are by default opted out of beta versions. You can opt-in by accessing your user account on the SlideMagic web site and tick the appropriate box. Make sure you are logged in to your account in the SlideMagic desktop app as well for the automatic updates to work.

To switch back to stable updates only, untick the box in your user account, and go to the desktop app download page to install the latest regular version of the app.

It is pretty amazing that today’s software development tools enable this juggling of regular and beta versions in just a few lines of code. Soon, beta versions will move again from plumbing to a number of new features I have in mind. Stay tuned.

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

I just released a new version of the SlideMagic desktop app with an important update: a more precise engine for panning and zooming images. It was a very big update (a completely new image rendering engine) and to most users, there will hardly be any visible difference to the app.

But more advanced users will notice how image fills and fits now exactly, exactly fill the shape boxes, and how to (much bigger) image zoom slider is much more precise.

(For those interested: the old image rendering engine was still based on CSS background images with their obscure placement interface, a left over from the web-centric architecture of SlideMagic v1.0)

Photo by Pedro Monteiro on Unsplash

Now that SlideMagic 2.0 is nearing completion I have turned my mind to putting together tutorials. For the moment, I am keeping it short and to the point, you can follow my work here: www.slidemagic.com/tutorial. This is all still work in progress.

I added a spell checker to V2.4.40 of SlideMagic. Incorrectly spelled words get a little underlining, right clicking gives you access to some spelling suggestions, and the option to add a correctly spelled word to the library.

This feature was high on the list of priorities of my daughter, who is using SlideMagic a lot for school projects.

Photo by Edurne Chopeitia on Unsplash

Different types of audiences, different types of questions, and/or different phases in your interaction with the audience require different types of slides.

1. In the first meeting, you introduce an idea with a big, bold, minimalist data chart
2. In a follow-up meeting, you are answered a question about assumptions behind the numbers, or, in a Zoom meeting, your audience sits very close to her screen and has time / visual ability to dig deeper into the visuals than she would be able to when sitting in a big room.

For these occasions, you can make slide variations of the same slide. Seen an example below:

Clicking back and forth between the slides will give the illusion of some sort of animated popup, while in effect the audience is looking at two different visuals. In practice, I would design the busy slide first, then cut things out to create your minimalist slide.

Note how easy it is in SlideMagic to toss things around and add (remove) complications to your slide without breaking its visual grid

I added a number of new title pages to the SlideMagic slide template database: looking up in the downtown area of a city. The sky in the center of the image is a nice empty background for your text.

Typing “title” in the search bar of the SlideMagic desktop app now gives a lot of options to get you started with a title page for your presentation

Pick one of these designs (or an empty slide), and use the image search feature to add the image that you prefer

The reminder email has gone out to all SlideMagic 1.0 subscribers to download your presentations before I shut the service down and migrate the platform completely to SlideMagic 2.0. (I will keep the archived presentations but access won’t be instant).

Some people signed up five years ago, and I got some bounces from people who changed jobs / email address. So, another reminder here if you have an account but did not get your email.

Other people. say that it is not completely clear how to download your presentation(s). Here are the steps:

1. Log in to SlideMagic 1.0
2. Open your presentation in SlideMagic 1.0
3. Select the “export” arrow from the left menu
4. Pick “download .magic file”
5. Download and install the SlideMagic 2.0 desktop app
6. Open the .magic file in the desktop app.

Here are the screen shots of the steps:

(Notice how I removed the hard-wired title page with the black bar from SlideMagic 2.0)

Towards the end of October, we will be pulling the plug on the SlideMagic 1.0 server. If you are a SlideMagic 1.0 user, you need to download your presentations as .magic files to your local hard drive, after which you will continue to be able to edit them in the SlideMagic 2.0 app.

SlideMagic 2.0 is vastly superior when compared to 1.0, with much more intuitive user interface, instant PowerPoint and PDF conversion, integrated Unsplash and Pixabay image search, waterfall charts, and a huge template database (SlideMagic 1.0 probably had 20 templates or so), just to name a few features. SlideMagic 1.0 was a web app, SlideMagic 2.0 is a desktop app that also works when you are not connected to the Internet, and has deeper access to your computer’s operating system for things like managing files and copying things between windows.

SlideMagic 1.0 users will be getting a reminder email over then next few days. I do plan to keep the SlideMagic 1.0 user presentations somewhere backed up, but access will be on request and no longer instant as of November 2020.

SlideMagic 1.0 was a necessary step to start the journey, it enabled me to get my head around what a modern presentation app should look like. But it has served its purpose.

The SlideMagic 1.0 log in is here: http://app.slidemagic.com, you can try the new app here https://www.slidemagic.com/app .

As I focused on the user experience of SlideMagic, I kept a temporary payment engine running, it takes a simple payment, but does not yet manage subscriptions. Subscription management is a bit more tricky, you need to keep user payment details on record securely, and manage renewals, cancellations, updates. That will soon all be tightly integrated with the Stripe payments platform.

In the process, I am now taking down the ‘day pass’ pricing option that allowed you to buy a maximum of 10 slide downloads for the duration of 1 day. I think this confusing what SlideMagic is trying to be: a full presentation solution (as opposed to a by-the-slide template business of which there are thousands on the internet).

Now SlideMagic has 2 offerings:

• A free model with access to all slides (for the moment) in .magic format
• A pro model that also includes PowerPoint, PDF conversion, and the ability to add your logo on slides, $99 per seat per year.

The free model gives people a change to get to know SlideMagic, offers a workable solution for users on a low budget (students, etc.). The Pro version is useful for people that need to use SlideMagic for real, share presentations in other formats with colleagues and clients, and need to brand slides in their own look and feel.

I will make sure that the payment engine works in a robust way first, then I will have to resort to modifying the web site with a better illustration of the positioning.