SlideMagic Blog

I had a backlog of feature improvement for SlideMagic in the back of my mind for a long time (SlideMagic 4.0). Started working on it, but never pushed them to a final end product. I am actually glad I didn’t. The path I was going down on was a “hand-held” guidance of AI combined with a dramatically improved graphical user interface. The development of AI models have made this approach obsolete.

i am starting now to tweak and customize the recently released knowledge workflow productivity tools so they work for me. Strangely enough, my decision to build SlideMagic 2.0 as a desktop app with local file access, will come in handy now to build a tool that wraps the raw engine and makes the underlying engine accessible to the average user.

Let’s see where this goes.

In my ‘spare time’ I have been working on newer versions of SlideMagic to include more AI. The tricky bit is that LLMs are designed to manipulate words, rather than working with 2 dimensional layouts. So my approach was some sort of step-by-step guided process, where I take the LLM by the hand and instruct it to create pretty decent slides.

A promising approach, but it would still require a lot of development work. The lines of code, would have to be replaced by lines of prompts….

I am just now playing around with the latest AI tools from Anthropic (Claude). They are designed to help you write software. But I decided to throw SlideMagic files at it. And the result is in credible. With a few instructions, you get working .magic files that perfectly capture your intent.

I suspect the average SlideMagic user is not yet ready to edit .magic files in a command prompt environment though. So there is work for me to do, but I can drop my work from the last few months and start using a completely new paradigm….

AI is very poor at navigating context history. “Go back to the previous version”, “change this”, “replace that”, will almost always lead to confused, diluted responses. You need to “freeze” progress in your work. You got to a good version. Asked for an improvement but did not get it: open a new chat windows and start fresh without the last message exchange.

I am sure it is a matter of months before this issue gets resolved in most AI applications.

Triggered by a post by Nate Jones on Substack (might be paywalled).

I am working on a next big update for SlideMagic, where I am trying to push AI-supported slide generation to the next level. Especially when it comes to layouts with data and text in them, AI is not there yet. The more I start experimenting, the more I realize that AI should not be used everywhere: hallucinations, unpredictable (non-repeatable) outcomes, long wait times, LLM model changes that can completely trip up the tool you have written on top of it.

Nate identifies 4 use cases:

1. Traditional data processing (adding up last month’s sales by product)
2. Traditional machine learning (predicting machine failure base on historical data)
3. Generative AI (summarizing stuff using a chatbot)
4. AI agents (planning your holiday by optimizing and matching lots of constraints)

Work in progress.

I worked with Google’s Nano Banana a bit more over the past days, and I think I understands what it is doing under the hood.

“Regular” imaging LLMs predict pixels, you give a prompt, the prompt gets translated into a series of tokens, and the model predicts the best matching pixels given the token input. A flat “soup of pixels” is the result. And because of that, it is hard to make small adjustments to an image, editing one particular aspect and leaving everything else as is.

I suspect Nano Banana works with layers. The model tries to understand what aspect of it refers to the bottom of the pile (the background) and what elements go on top. As a result, it is possible to make very precise edits to individual objects in the overall composition of the image.

In order to make a coherent image, the model needs to have a good understanding of the 3D perspective of the background, and all the objects above it. Like the example about the Porsche in a Dutch town in my previous post, the car gets rotated, and pasted back into the background image with the correct vanishing point in mind.

Vanishing point is preserved when making edits to the image

What the model cannot do is change camera position. view the entire image from a completely different angle. Zooming in and zooming out works. An example is the cover image of this post, where I took an image from the band of my son (Project71) and put them on a big stage. I could not get the model to produce a view from the audience given the image it already produced. (Starting from scratch with an explicit prompt for an audience view would have worked of course).

I just played around with Google’s “Nano Banana” AI image generator, and it is incredibly good and useful for presentation design.

Current AI image generators take a prompt and predict pixels. Ask for a modification, and a whole new bunch of pixels get generated, redoing the entire image. Nano Banana (we need a better/shorter name), seems to work with layers and objects, and keeps things consistent.

Below 2 quick examples:

“White Porsche in Hoogeveen”

“Turn it around”

Some observations:

• Super fast, the first image was an almost instant response
• Hyper realistic image, does not look cartoonish
• Correct text: the name of the cafe, the license plate, the branding of the car
• (That town looks Dutch, but it is not Hoogeveen)
• But most importantly: isolated editing, changing one thing and leave everything else the same

Photoshop, it was nice meeting you…

I will study the API structure of Nano Banana and see whether I can swap out the image generator in SlideMagic.

Impressive! You can try it out in Google AI Studio

I am following academic efforts to use LLMs to improve / automate slide design with great interest. Each takes a slightly different approach. SlideAudit was recently published by Zhuohao Jerry Zhang and others.

SlideAudit teach LLMs what good design is by teaching it rules and principles. A lot of effort goes into building a bank of slides, identifying design flaws for training, synthetically introducing slides, letting the model run and evaluate the results.

I think this approach can work well for publications that resemble print: designs with lots of text in smaller fonts, and images / graphics that are placed in some sort of grid. Books, magazines, newspapers, but also web sites.

Presentation slides are trickier. It is harder to describe what makes a slide a good slide. You know when it when you see a good one (or a bad one), but pinpointing and automating the steps to go from bad to good is tricky.

Photographer Ray Giubilo snapped this image at the current US Open Tennis tournament. Searching for “Jasmine Paolini” might come up with this result for the next few years….

During the Windows - Apple battle of the early 2000s, one of Apple’s major arguments always was that things “just worked”. No drivers to install, software was simple and easy to understand. Things did not crash.

Being both a developer and an amateur electronic musician, I am always a bit late to update my computer’s operating system. I recently upgraded to Sequioa and have noticed a constant trickle of small, little glitches. Difficulties switching audio outputs, Facetime phones that keep on ringing after answering a call, weirdness when waking up a laptop with external monitors attached, apps not working. The solution is usually a machine re-boot.

I hope it is my particular machine set up.

SlideMagic has added direct support for Apple Silicon, Apple computers with ‘M” processors. This will make the performance of SlideMagic on modern Apple machines much faster. (Previous version used an on-the-spot translation from Intel to ARM, draining performance).

In the download sections of the web site you will now see 3 buttons: Windows (unchanged), Mac (modern ARM machines), and Mac Intel (older Macs that are still on Intel processors).

The automatic update feature of SlideMagic will not switch you over to the new version. You will have to re-install SlideMagic from the web site. From then on, updates will be for Apple Silicon.