SlideMagic Blog

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

Here is a slide from a recent Daimler strategy presentation:

The slide does not look bad, and is definitely an improvement of earlier versions of the same chart:

Still there is room for improvement:

• The big blue action verbs are highlighted, but these are not the key messages of each box. (Side note: yes it is the most correct way to write things starting with an action verb, but when space is limited, I tend to break this rule).
• The 16x9 wide screen format invites a horizontal layout, which in turn makes the resulting narrow boxes hard to read, and the layout looks a bit strange because of the line breaks resulting from longer words
• Wording can be reduced and improved further.

I quickly put something together in SlideMagic. It might look a bit less sophisticated than the heavily designed slide above (exactly in the spirit of SlideMagic), but I think it conveys the message better.

(Disclaimer: the above text is obviously mine and not the Daimler strategy)

I added this slide to the SlideMagic template database, search for ‘strategy’ in the desktop app or download it. (The thumbnail of the slide looks a bit different, as all slides show up in 4x3 format on a light background, you can change those settings instantly in the app).

Producers of productivity software are changing the user interfaces of their software:

• To make things work with (their own preferred) cloud storage service instead of the computer file system
• To copy user friendly concepts from the world of consumer software to enterprise users. (What if Instagram would have used drop down menus?)
• To make it even better because they can (“duplicate” is so much clearer than “save as”)

On an app-by-app basis this might be a good decision. The new user interface is definitely better than the one that originated in the 1990s on one of the first releases of Windows.

But there is a problem for the enterprise user: all applications start to look different. Wonder what would happen if car manufacturers start switching around the pedals and other basic inputs of vehicles…

Also, the use settings of a consumer and enterprise application are different. Fixing the numbers or details in an annual report or contract is different from posting your latest story.

SlideMagic has a radically different user interface when it comes to designing slides, but the basic file management controls are pretty traditional.

Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash

It is a bad idea to bend the truth in investor communications. Alternative reality might get you the attention in the first deck screening (or that initial bump in the share price), but things will come crashing down if you cannot deliver on your “mortgage” towards the future. The value of your business gets reset to where it should be, but also, your own personal credibility just got a big blow, creating a negative impact for your current idea and everything you are planning to do in the rest of your career.

Sometimes the truth bending might not be intentional. A marketing person in a pharma company might say/believe that we have “phase 2 data”, when in fact the company has “phase 2 preliminary data”. It sounds the same, but makes a huge difference in how investors evaluate a pharma business. Pay attention to detail where it matters.

Try keeping your presentation honest without:

• Actually amplifying your weakness… There is a middle ground between hiding the truth and putting it on the cover page. In the latter scenario you will score a lot of points for honesty, but investors will doubt your ability to communicate with investors and clients
• Let lawyers take over your slide and fill it with disclaimers, it just becomes background noise (think of the Fortune 500 CFO reading the legal disclaimers while journalists walk into the auditorium for the analyst presentation).

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

A reminder that we will be pulling the plug on SlideMagic 1.0 (long live 2.0!) on October 31. Over the next week you will still be able to download your presentations yourself from the old site, after that, you will need to contact support to ask someone to go down into the basement and find it for you in the archives.

Instructions for V1.0 download are here.

If you stopped using SlideMagic years ago because you did not (yet) like it that much, be sure to check out SlideMagic 2.0 which is in a totally different league. The desktop app can read your V1.0 presentations.

Photo by Tincho Franco on Unsplash

My daughter is progressing through high school and is now asked more and more to write essays with her opinion. This got me to think about four levels of writing a story:

1. Without having a clear idea of the answer/plot, you start jotting down your thoughts with the main objective of reaching the total word count, and buzzword count targets. This gets you a fail on an exam, and you can also compare this to an unprepared presenter “winging it”.
2. You write a skeleton of the points you want to make, in the right order, with main headings and sub bullets, all in super short grammatically incorrect and incomplete language (because you are the only person who needs to understand it). This is probably what the high school teacher is trying to reverse engineer from the full essay when grading it: did she make the right points.
3. The skeleton, but now expanded into proper language. It makes the point, it is logical and organised, it is grammatically correct, but also, it is pretty boring. This would be a typical exam submission of a student, or a management consulting report
4. A convincing story, that abandons some of the logical rigour of the previous level and replaces it with an interesting flow, with some tension that resolves to the conclusion. As opposed to “winging it”, this is a story that a skilled salesperson can pull off on the fly without any slides or skeletons. Very few business documents or high school essays make it to this level.

In the latest version of SlideMagic, all boxes now have slightly rounded edges. You actually need to look carefully to see it, but the impact on the overall slide layout is dramatic, things look more friendly.

Apple is a big believer in round edges in its designs. It claims that sharp edges do not appear in nature and are not natural shapes. (Well there are crystals). But I think Apple is overdoing it. The camera unit on the back of an iPhone for example has too large of a corner radius, and in many of the app screen designs the corner radius of the window, hardware, and icons clash.

In PowerPoint and Keynote the default setting for a corner radius is also too big, and there is no way to adjust them precisely to the same value (you can only drag with a mouse).

The edges in the SlideMagic PowerPoint conversions stay sharp for the moment, I can programmatically tweak regular shapes in PowerPoint (so no more mouse dragging), however for images I still have an issue.

The latest version of SlideMagic is 2.4.45 and you can download it here for free (Windows and Mac).

Photo by Eddy 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

The pattern repeats in demonstrations and political debates:

• The other side is clueless
• Everything the other side does , does not make sense
• We are right, they are wrong (always)
• Etc.

You will never convince people who are deeply attached to their beliefs. The people who can swing the majority are in the center. Questioning the intelligence and making fun of the people just across the line of the center (and their friends) is not going to make it easier for them to switch.

Preaching to the converted with a megaphone won’t help. Listening to, understanding, and engaging with the doubters possibly could.

This is true for political debates, but also for sales and investor pitches.

Photo by Chris Slupski on Unsplash

With all the talk about exponential growth of the virus, logarithmic scales are popping up in graphs everywhere.

What is a logarithmic scale? Unlike those on a linear scale, the units on a logarithmic scale change. See the chart below.

The result is that the normally speaking rapidly growing line 10^x now appears as a simple straight line.

Exponential functions can be hard to graph, analyse and compare. Toning down the scale makes things more manageable. I remember in high school, I used log mm paper to plot graphs from physics or chemistry experiments. By measuring the incline of the line, I could estimate exponential coefficients, and compare them.

While logarithmic scales are a great practical tool for scientists, I think they are less useful in presentations to a more general audience. “Look at this straight line, but in order to understand how fast tings are really growing, look at the small numbers that reveal the axis measurements”. People simply don’t grasp the concept of a logarithmic scale. If the virus grows exponentially, well, show an exponential line.

If you need to compare exponential growth, make a bar chart of the growth rates, rather than drawing straight lines on logarithmic scales.