SlideMagic Blog

Yesterday I wrote about how difficult it is to keep your application windows organised across two very large monitors. Colleague Nick Smith pointed me to this neat utility: Divvy. It creates a pop up grid that allows you to position windows quickly. Available for both Windows and Mac OSX. This features should be baked into operating systems as a standard feature.

I broke my laptop screen and was forced to rethink my IT setup. For the first time in 10 years, I went back to a desktop as my main computer: the 27" iMac and will fix up my laptop as a secondary computer for onsite client work or travel. My desktop is also connected to one additional large Thunderbolt display.

The difference between the 5k monitor and the Thunderbolt screen is amazing. After working for 1 day on the new screen, you can’t imagine having had to deal with this grainy Thunderbolt monitor for a couple of years. (The Thunderbolt screen is long overdue for an upgrade).

Two big monitors work also better than one big screen and a laptop as a side monitor. Mac OSX is still clunky when dragging large application windows between different size screens. You always had to fiddle and resize windows. Now that the monitors are more or less the same aspect ratio I no longer have that issue.

Still I believe that the fluid window-based operating system where you can resize and position windows where ever you want them creates messy work environments. Mac OSX needs some sort of grid structure where you can snap things into place. Maybe an extension of the new multi-app feature that is now part of iOS.

When going back to desktop you need to budget for one more piece of equipment: a backup battery (UPS). The power goes down, your computer goes down. Apple should have put in a 5 minute battery that enables you to power down the machine orderly in case of a power failure. The latter we tend to have here in Israel in the middle of the summer when air conditioners drive the power grid to its maximum capacity, or in the winter when violent thunderstorms hit power lines.

I like to use one single visual concept as much as I can in a presentation. Two by two matrices, graphs, frameworks, they all require time to absorb by an audience. If you have to through in a new one on every single page, things can get pretty tiring. Management consultants tend to do this, and forget that the audience did not spend 3 months on the project but is hearing the story for the first time.

Luckily common issues in a presentation are often related:

• Why is something difficult to do  (problem)
• What is your solution
• Why is the competition different

If you can fit all of this in a variant of the same diagram, you will save the audience a lot of time.

Art: Robert Antoine Pichon, Le Pont Aux Anglais, 1905

I now have spent more hours taking notes and sketching with my iPad Pro 9.7 + pencil combo (read the earlier post). Things are still not perfect.

Taking notes

The big issue is instant availability of your canvas. Keep the screen on continuously and you drain your battery in less than an hour. Do auto-power off and you find your self do this for every single scribble you want to make 1) press home button 2) touch id 3) touch canvas to activate the writing surface. The latter is probably an issue in the Evernote Penultimate app, which has 2 modes: One where you view notes, and one where you can edit them.

Sketching ideas

• The 9.7" screen is to small for sketching big, bold concepts, I need more space. (But then I don’t want to carry an iPad Pro 12" around). You actually need 2 devices.
• Current apps don’t support erasing very well. You have to go into a menu, change the pencil to an eraser, erase, then switch it back again. Maybe Apple can put a sensor in the back of the pencil and make it an eraser, or could enable the use of multiple pencils in the same app. My creative process is rather paper intensive. I use a huge pile of old paper: make a bold sketch, toss it away, make another one, and another one, until I iterate to a chart in 10 loops or so. Even the pretty app Paper by 53 does not accommodate this workflow.

The presidential campaign is gearing up in the US, and opinion pages and social media posts are full of passionate declarations of support and/or disapproval of a specific candidate. Most of these are not going to convince people to change their mind though.  In most cases, the audience and the “presenter” probably agree already, they read the same newspaper, watch the same channel and are friends connected on social media.

To make change, you need to convince the people that are doubters, the people in the centre. You don’t do that by implying that supporters of the other side are not very smart or insulting them in other ways.

Think about the doubters, what it the final straw that might convince them to switch sides?

Image from WikiPedia

When there is not much information about a market available, startups sometimes commission new research to dig up the facts and make projections. The end result is often a slide with one number: “Our extensive research shows that the market will be $1,0234,654 in 2020, the full report is too detailed and we won’t bore you with it”.

Investors are not going to buy this.

Here are some things you can do:

• If the research was conducted by a reputable consulting firm, put the source prominently on the slide. But not many startups can afford rubber stamping buy expensive consulting firms.
• Round up your numbers. $1.0b is better than $1,0234,654
• Break up your $1.0b in individual market segments (if you can)
• Relate your $1.0b to something that exists today. Your precise market does not exist yet, but people spend money on activities that are related, similar.
• Show a deep dive on one segment, one part of the analysis to explain the thorough methodology you have applied, leave out the other 325 segments.
• Break down the $1.0b in things people can touch: # of customers, price per product/month/subscriber,  # of countries, etc.
• If you are getting only 5% of the $1.0b market, think about who will have the other 95%. If you cannot identify them, go back to your market estimate.

The above is useful when making the presentation, but can also be handy when you brief consultants for a project.

In big presentation days with lots of decks you get the inevitable situation that some slides fit in multiple presentations. Some presenters double them up, and start presenting the slide (after the apology “you have seen/heard this before” as if it was the first time).

Don’t. Repetition is boredom. Your audience can/will remember. You have 2 options:

• A super short “taste” of what is about to come later. I.e., introduce what a certain company does briefly, without going into any detail or background. Do the full elaborate presentation the second time around with a quick reference to your earlier slide
• Do the full presentation early on, and give a very small recap of the story later when it comes up the second time. One solution is to present a thumbnail screen shot of the original slide plus 2 bullet points (oops, yes I said it) of the key take aways of the slide.

Over the years I have written many reviews of styli and iPad note taking apps on this blog. I am a heavy user of notes:

• Jotting down things during client presentation briefings. A very small part of this is actually to make sure I do not forget certain things (a correction on page 53, the total market for home insurance). For the most part I find that when I write things down, I remember them better. I actually never look back at the notes.
• The second big use of a note pad is to draw sketches for charts. Almost every chart with a sketch.

Up until now, I have not found a good alternative to pencil and paper:

• Tapping on laptops (and iPad screen keyboards) disrupts the flow of a meeting (you look like a note taking clerk)
• Styli were physically unpleasant to work with (too small, too fat)
• Handwriting recognition on iPad was not optimal (small strokes, palm interference).

The iPad Pro (I have the 9.7" version) and Apple Pencil changed a lot. I actually use the device now in meetings and leave my note book and pencil at home. I tried Apple Notes, Penultimate, and Paper by 53. Of these, Penultimate suits me best in meetings. Everything syncs to Evernote (they got me locked in), nice and fat pen strokes, and easy to add pages and scroll over your notes. The big issue has now become battery life. Watch out in long meetings where you leave the screen on for a long time.

I have been incredibly busy with client work over the past months, but over the summer, I plan to turn my attention back to SlideMagic, my presentation design app. Two ideas have started to form in my head:

• A smart way to get you to select the right basic slide layout depending on the sort of message you want to deliver
• A tool that helps you select and stitch a story flow together, depending on the type of story you want to deliver

Obviously I could also focus on making existing features better: a more accurate PowerPoint conversion, better rendering on iPads for example.

For beta users out there, what do you want to see? You can let me know via jan at slidemagic dot com.

Some interesting reading here by Netflix who analysed how effective icons/tiles of its movies and TV shows were.