SlideMagic Blog

This guest post by Jakob Jochmann on Jon Thomas’ blog triggered this observation: more and more, I start to email out intermediate versions of my presentations in PDF format because people can read them on mobile devices. This format is good enough for high-level comments on early drafts. The final round of edits needs a bigger screen.

So I replaced my computing infrastructure over the past week. Things are moving fast in the world of IT.

• Laptop. A few years ago having decent graphical power still restricted you to using desktops. No longer. I have gone mobile. (Maybe motion graphics will make me regret it later). No I can use those little downtimes in between meetings to do actual useful work, rather than catching up on email or Twitter.
• 17", I compared screen sizes and concluded that as a visual designer there is no avoiding the extra weight and size to get a decent size screen
• Apple. Strangely enough it is actually the physical interfaces that convinced me. A nice machine to touch, nice keyboard, nice track pad. Something you spend the majority of your day on. Interestingly, a hardware decision, not a software one.
• Cloud. It was surprisingly simple to move to a new environment when all your critical data resides in the cloud: email on gmail, files in dropbox (affiliate link), clients and invoices in Freshbooks (affiliate link), contacts in Batchbook. Everything is in sync on my new machine, and the legacy infrastructure that I continue to use as backup. 1Password synced via Dropbox to keep track of all the accounts
• Virtual Windows/OSX blur. None of my clients use Keynote, and PowerPoint on Mac is simply not good enough (see a comparison between PowerPoint 2010 for Windows and PowerPoint 2011 for Mac). So in comes Windows, but I totally do not notice it. I use Parallels to create a virtual machine, and my Windows applications run in a Window as if I am working on a Mac. All data is shared and file management happens via OSX. It requires beefing up the hardware though. I put in 8GB of memory, of which I allocate 5GB to the Windows machine. The big customer segment for Parallels is actually hardcore gamers who want to port their favorite graphics-intensive games to the Mac. As a result, performance of a Windows virtual machine is actually very good. There is only a slight delay when you switch over.
• Adobe alternatives. Adobe software is incredibly complicated and bloated. I need basic photo editing capabilities to resize images for the web and take out backgrounds out of images. Pixelmator is a beautiful Mac app that can do all these things (and much more) in a beautiful user interface. The same with Illustrator, I need it to edit stock vector diagrams nothing more. I could not find an alternative for Mac yet and as a result kept my old Windows CS3 installed (I see no need to upgrade). It is interesting to see that I started to look at user interfaces to decide my software, not so much the features anymore (same story as in hardware).
• Legacy software. Some of my clients (mostly the large ones) are still running PowerPoint 2003. Hence I actually installed it in parallel to my production software PowerPoint 2010. (It took some time to dig up those old CDs).

I have now spent a few days doing real presentation design client work on PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. This post brings together impressions published in earlier blog posts.

The bottom line is that the average user will not notice any differences between the 2 versions of PowerPoint. Some positives:

1. The application has slightly more Mac fee to it
2. I like the organized way fonts weights are grouped together.
3. The integration with Aperture, a photo organizer is very good. If you buy images from iStockPhoto, somehow a lot of keywords are saved with the file. PowerPoint 2011 integrates seamlessly with Aperture, making the full library of images on your hard drive searchable by keyword.

The professional presentation designer however, will notice a few differences. PowerPoint 2010 can do a bit more than PowerPoint 2011:

1. The selection pane, a great tool construct complex layered diagrams is missing. (An earlier post about the selection pane here)
2. Toolbar customization could make PowerPoint 2011 crash. Especially, do not try to drag the straight arrow connector into your top toolbar. If your software has been corrupted, see this Microsoft post about how to fix things. [UPDATE, THE RELEASE OF SP 1 MIGHT HAVE SOLVED THIS ISSUE]
3. Whenever you try to move or resize an object very close to the static guides, PowerPoint will decide to move the static guide, not the object, and staying on the subject of static guides: you cannot space the interval at which you want to set static guides.
4. Color rendering can be a bit off. When give the text and its background shape the same color, you can still read the text on the Mac, but not on the PC. PowerPoint for the Mac handles colors for shapes and text differently.
5. PowerPoint for Mac cannot embed custom fonts (PowerPoint Ninja explains what this is)
6. You cannot insert vector shapes in the Mac version of PowerPoint (see here why this is can be useful), so if you want to adjust the color of a vector diagram, you have to do it in Illustrator and import the illustration as a picture into PowerPoint.

Triggered by the iPad touch interface, I started to use mindmapping for the first time in presentation design. Mindmapping is a process in which you jot down ideas and the connections between them quickly, and edit, clean up, and move things around later to get a more organized picture. I must say, it works a lot better than my previous approach: the pencil and a piece of paper. Especially since it is a lot harder to lose that piece of paper with your notes on it.

I purchased 2 iPad apps: iThoughtsHD and DropMind. iThoughtsHD was designed specifically for the iPad, and is the cheaper of the 2 ($10 versus $50 for DropMind). The DropMind app is an extension from an existing suite of desktop and web applications. The latter probably explains why it took a relatively long time for DropMind to come out with the app, a working iOS 4.2 version only appeared last week in the app store.

When reading my impressions remember that I am a light-weight mind mapper, just using it to structure ideas for a presentation. Reading around on the Internet it looks like mindmapping is a whole design approach taking things much further than I do.

For the purpose I use it for, iThoughtsHD works perfectly fine. The interface is straightforward and clean, and it is every easy to export mindmaps to PDF or sync them using a Dropbox account.

DropMind’s user interface looks a little bit more sophisticated with more graphical options. When you buy the iPad app, they also offer a perpetual license for the desktop client, and the web app. You can exchange mindmaps between the applications. There is a wide arsenal of tools available that I did not yet have time for to explore. The one drawback I found is that when you export a map to PDF or JPG, the resolution seems to be very low (not an issue with iThoughtsHD). I think this is a bug, or maybe I did not configure the settings correctly).

I do not understand software applications that do not use small arrows in their menus for rotating pages 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise. It creates the exact same visual delay as bullet points:

1. Read “clock wise”
2. Imagine clock movement
3. Project movement on image
4. Think: “No I need the other one”
5. Select menu option “counter-clockwise”

A visual shortcut is needed (i.e., a simple arrow)

I stumbled on this post on the Dutch Presentatie Blog: 3 reasons why Prezi is not a PowerPoint killer. In short (and in English):

1. Non-linearity is great for conveying information, it is poor for building up the suspense of a story
2. Dramatic zooming effects take away attention from the speaker to the screen (the blog speaks jokingly about “Prezi motion sickness”)
3. The graphical capabilities of Prezi are (still) poor (colors, fonts, shapes, data charts) when compared to other applications

I must say, I tend to agree with the assessment for the traditional stand-up presentation. Does that mean Prezi should be written off? I am not sure either. Where it could be useful:

• In the hands of highly specialized designers, rather than the mass market. It could be the basis for a great way to let people discover a product or service interactively on a web site. It would be expensive and time consuming to develop, but once it’s there it should provide a great return on investment.
• For the mass market, maybe the product should be simplified to create a basic web-based presentation tool with great ability to embed things into web sites and blogs. With the advent of HTML5, I think we are going to see a dramatic shift in how web sites look. And there will be a huge market for a simple tool that can create great web content. Obviously here it is open to competition from Sliderocket, Google Docs, and others (a PC World review of PowerPoint alternatives via Tony Ramos).

I have been working for a few days with Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 now (affiliate link), having upgraded from the earlier version PowerPoint 2008. For me, the Mac is still a secondary machine, and testing this software is one of the key determinants whether I can move across all together to a Mac environment. All my clients use PC-based Microsoft Office software, so Keynote cannot replace office.

Initially I was a bit wary of Office 2011, having read some poor reviews on Amazon and by columnists such as David Pogue. Maybe it was because of this that I wrote this impulse post about stability issues of PowerPoint 2011.

I managed to solve the problem (after a lot of searching online). Somehow, PowerPoint 2011 can crash every time you enter slideshow mode after you have done some heavy toolbar customization. It happened to me a few times in a row. All fine, customize toolbars, crash, reset toolbars, all fine, customize toolbars, crash. At the moment I stopped the poker game (do I have the courage to add another toolbar customization or not, at the risk of having to reset all previous modifications?) at a level that I am happy with my current toolbars. So the issue remains.

For the rest, I must say that I actually like PowerPoint 2011. The differences with the PC version are minimal, someone with experience with PowerPoint on a PC can switch over instantly. The previous version (PowerPoint 2008) had a user interface that was different from the PC, and also lacked some functionality. Now there is a level playing field. (Well almost, for some reason you cannot change the spacing of the grid in PowerPoint 2011, making it hard to set a grid line exactly at 0 of your slide).

UPDATE: To readers arriving here via Google: this is a post from February 2011. However, as I write this in January 2015, Microsoft PowerPoint 2011 for Mac again is crashing frequently. I recommend saving your work often. I corresponded via Twitter with the Microsoft support team and they pointed me to their general cleanup suggestions here (basically removing all your preferences).

Want to try out an alternative to PowerPoint? Request a beta invite for the new presentation design software SlideMagic here!

Here is the original post from 2011:

OK, more searching solved the issue, which can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975723 My toolbar folders were corrupt.

Everything is working again without toolbar customization. But when I start modifying the toolbars again (I need a set of 20 buttons or so to be really fast an efficient in PowerPoint), the whole saga starts again. I will keep you posted about my experience with Microsoft PowerPoint 2011.

I have been battling with PowerPoint 2011 for the Mac for the past hour and it seems seriously flawed. When entering slideshow mode, it just crashes. Searching online for a solution reveals dozens of forum discussions about the same issue that are unresolved. Do not upgrade from Office 2008. Repeat, do not buy it, it is not stable yet! Usually I am an early adopter of software and can live with a few bugs here and there. Not being able to go into slideshow mode kills the purpose of PowerPoint, this is a serious flaw.

The shape combine function in PowerPoint 2010 is great. Here is an example of how you can create text that seems to be flying through a circle. The key is the create 2 half circles and send one of them to the back. In earlier version of PowerPoint, this was very hard to do. (See a review of PowerPoint 2010 here).

PowerPoint designers are struggling with big file sizes that consume storage and make it hard to email documents. I have discussed solutions such as YouSendIt and Google Docs before (here). Recently, I switched to Dropbox:

• Seamless integration with all my devices (desktop, laptop, mobile phone, tablet)
• Seamless integration with these devices’ operating system (you do not notice it is there)
• Two solutions in one: 1) sharing big files 2) always access to your own files
• Nice extra 3) a service that keeps history of your files so you can roll back a version in case a file got corrupted or you made a horrible design mistake.
• Minimalist design interface

The Dropbox pitch to venture capitalists from 2007 pretty much still holds.

YouSendIt requires sign in all the time, and all the advertising and branding does not look very professional. Google Docs is still hard to integrate with Microsoft Office. Office Live does not integrate fully with the Windows operating system. It also suffers from feature overload: I do not always want to create a full virtual team room with calenders and contact lists, just sharing files is enough.

If you sign up with this link for your free 2GB account, you get 250MB of bonus space (disclosure: and I get another 500MB). You see, they know how to market as well. The regular link is here.

The last word probably has not been said about this subject, I wonder whether the conclusion still will be the same in January 2012.