SlideMagic Blog

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.

There was a small glitch in the AI image generator in the SlideMagic desktop app. It has been fixed. Log in and out of your account to get everything working again. (AI images are a pro feature)

Need to make over a slide but don’t have access to the data in a graph? AI to the rescue. Upload a screen shot to an LLM and you get back pretty good estimates of the data values in the chart. It might not be scientifically 100% accurate, but good enough to recreate the graph in your own presentation software.

One of my big slide puzzles is usually a messy table of pros/cons of a product, or a competitive comparison. How to highlight the right dimensions. Make sure that one is not a sub point of another. Make sure that cells have short text in them. Make sure that text is roughly equally long in each cell.

GPT-5 is very good at this. Copy-paste the messy table into the interface, and the output is pretty useful. Something to integrate in SlideMagic at some stage.

Many confidential presentations often use disguised case examples of clients, potential investments, drugs in development. AI has become incredibly good at uncovering even the most vague ones. Before sending your deck, double-check them in an LLM to see what comes up…

Apologies for the click bait…

I have not been writing here for a while now as I am focusing on 9xc/9vc. But recently, as I am pushing further into the world of AI, all my pas experiences seems to be coming together: computer science, company analysis, presentation design, and hardcore biopharma science…So I might occasionally come back here.

The majority of “presentations” are documents that are used make decisions inside companies. They happen to have graphs and other visuals inside them, hence the word “presentation”. Most humans are not very skilled in writing a concise memo to make a point: hence bullet points in large font and visuals to the rescue.

AI could change that: boiling down these big slide decks to a few paragraphs with a decision that needs to be taken, pros/cons of alternatives, and the recommended way forward. No slides needed.

Most project presentations consist of slides ripped from the project working documents. Pages you used to learn and discover things to analyze and make conclusions. They are not the best visuals to communicate the project outcomes to outsiders.

• Their layout is likely to be messy and detailed, designed to be read at close distance
• The structure of your project document is likely to be methodological, like a workplan that makes sure you cover all the bits of work required.

Here is an alternative approach to make your final presentation:

1. Leave your project working papers for what they are
2. Write a long-hand text (1 page) that explains what the conclusions and next steps are, supported only by facts that are critical in supporting the recommendations. (Not a “this is what we did” paper)
3. Now, make a completely new slide deck based on just that text document

This image will go in the history books anytime the election of 2024 will be discussed. Image credit: Evan Vucci , image analysis: David Altizer

The trick here is cropping. A good photographer will have a good first start when snapping the image, but adjusting things slightly afterwards can add a lot.