SlideMagic Blog

Now and then I get to see the presentations that people make with SlideMagic, often in emails with users that have questions or feedback, bugs, and charts which they are still struggling to get right. Yes, there are certain types of slides that SlideMagic does not really like (pie charts, complex system diagrams, anything with circles), but when I open these presentations in “story” view and see how the other 95% of that presentation looks without any professional help, I know things are starting to work. And these are proper A-B tests, since many SlideMagic users were clients of my bespoke design work, so I have seen many draft presentations by them coming my way that were not made in SlideMagic.

Photo by Jonas Olsen on Unsplash

A while ago it was discovered that investment bank Goldman Sachs refers to unsophisticated, non-professional, retail investors as “muppets” and was deploying massive computing power to trade against them.

“Muppet” is an example of a business language shortcut: one word that summarises a pretty complex concept or customer segment. Short cuts can make internal communication in a company very efficient. Everyone knows exactly what is being discussed without having to resort to long descriptions that change from presentation to presentation.

To the outsider though, they have a different meaning. Many people complain about “buzzwords”, especially when shortcuts that don’t mean anything leak into external communication. Or worse, as in the case of Goldman Sachs, you end up offending a lot of people.

Young kids also find out that is extremely hard to change back nicknames into a more grown up name when you get older. The same is true for business shortcuts. Better choose them wisely at the beginning, because they might just get a wider audience than that first conference room meeting.

With respect to “muppets”. Yes, amateur investors might not understand the interest rate climate, yield curves, market overhang, and inflation risk. They make mistakes, but they could also have a hunch that that weird flat phone with a touch screen could end up being a really desirable product that will change people’s lives 10 years from now. An algorithm powered by a super computer probably would not make that call. Muppets are a nuanced segment with many sides to take in to consideration. Better pick a better word.

My main work machine is in repair, which in Israel, means you lose it for at least a week. So I am back to working on old computers: a 2015 iMac, and a 2016 MacBook. And I must say: things are mostly fine on machines that I abandoned more than a year ago.

The 27” screen of the 2015 iMac somehow feels more comfortable than the LG 5K display that I use with my top of the line MacBook Pro. Processing speed for the work I do (writing code and designing slides) is totally fine. Even on the 2016 MacBook (with minimum spec even for 2016), things are fine. And that light weight is actually a real bonus versus the hot, heavy 15” MacBook Pro. It makes me think of future setups: desktop for the bulk of the work, and an “emergency” lower-spec laptop to enable working outside the office if needed.

The only issue I have is running a Windows machine via bootcamp to build the Windows version of SlideMagic. That software is noticeably slower.

If you are not a gamer, or a movie editor at Pixar, computers probably last a lot longer than you think. Come to think of it, most machine replacements were probably due to hard drive crashes. Now with solid state drives, that might happen for less frequently.

Another upside, I now get to test the SlideMagic app thoroughly on smaller screens and lower-spec graphics cards…

Photo by Nicholas Santoianni on Unsplash

I added a number of new title pages to the SlideMagic slide template database: looking up in the downtown area of a city. The sky in the center of the image is a nice empty background for your text.

Typing “title” in the search bar of the SlideMagic desktop app now gives a lot of options to get you started with a title page for your presentation

Pick one of these designs (or an empty slide), and use the image search feature to add the image that you prefer

The new line drawing feature in SlideMagic was put in to support the connection of boxes in organisation charts and flow diagrams, but you can use it more creatively as well. The attached examples of the use of hexagon shapes shows how you can bypass SlideMagic’s strict limitations on shape types (basically boxes). But do you need to?

Photo by Jonas Svidras on Unsplash

The reminder email has gone out to all SlideMagic 1.0 subscribers to download your presentations before I shut the service down and migrate the platform completely to SlideMagic 2.0. (I will keep the archived presentations but access won’t be instant).

Some people signed up five years ago, and I got some bounces from people who changed jobs / email address. So, another reminder here if you have an account but did not get your email.

Other people. say that it is not completely clear how to download your presentation(s). Here are the steps:

1. Log in to SlideMagic 1.0
2. Open your presentation in SlideMagic 1.0
3. Select the “export” arrow from the left menu
4. Pick “download .magic file”
5. Download and install the SlideMagic 2.0 desktop app
6. Open the .magic file in the desktop app.

Here are the screen shots of the steps:

(Notice how I removed the hard-wired title page with the black bar from SlideMagic 2.0)

Towards the end of October, we will be pulling the plug on the SlideMagic 1.0 server. If you are a SlideMagic 1.0 user, you need to download your presentations as .magic files to your local hard drive, after which you will continue to be able to edit them in the SlideMagic 2.0 app.

SlideMagic 2.0 is vastly superior when compared to 1.0, with much more intuitive user interface, instant PowerPoint and PDF conversion, integrated Unsplash and Pixabay image search, waterfall charts, and a huge template database (SlideMagic 1.0 probably had 20 templates or so), just to name a few features. SlideMagic 1.0 was a web app, SlideMagic 2.0 is a desktop app that also works when you are not connected to the Internet, and has deeper access to your computer’s operating system for things like managing files and copying things between windows.

SlideMagic 1.0 users will be getting a reminder email over then next few days. I do plan to keep the SlideMagic 1.0 user presentations somewhere backed up, but access will be on request and no longer instant as of November 2020.

SlideMagic 1.0 was a necessary step to start the journey, it enabled me to get my head around what a modern presentation app should look like. But it has served its purpose.

The SlideMagic 1.0 log in is here: http://app.slidemagic.com, you can try the new app here https://www.slidemagic.com/app .

I finally deployed the proper subscription backend for SlideMagic. That was a big technical and legal challenge, but everything works now.

When purchasing SlideMagic Pro you are now signing up for an annual subscription, giving you full access to all the features of the platform.

Canceling is transparent: the auto renewals is removed, and you have access to SlideMagic Pro for the remaining days of your subscription. If you decide to renew, you get issued a free “trial” for the days that are left in your plan, after which you get charged when the next subscription cycle starts.

I simplified the complicated license when doing consulting project work clients. No more exceptions, SlideMagic is a simple per seat, per year subscription.

Photo by Vasily Koloda on Unsplash

As I focused on the user experience of SlideMagic, I kept a temporary payment engine running, it takes a simple payment, but does not yet manage subscriptions. Subscription management is a bit more tricky, you need to keep user payment details on record securely, and manage renewals, cancellations, updates. That will soon all be tightly integrated with the Stripe payments platform.

In the process, I am now taking down the ‘day pass’ pricing option that allowed you to buy a maximum of 10 slide downloads for the duration of 1 day. I think this confusing what SlideMagic is trying to be: a full presentation solution (as opposed to a by-the-slide template business of which there are thousands on the internet).

Now SlideMagic has 2 offerings:

• A free model with access to all slides (for the moment) in .magic format
• A pro model that also includes PowerPoint, PDF conversion, and the ability to add your logo on slides, $99 per seat per year.

The free model gives people a change to get to know SlideMagic, offers a workable solution for users on a low budget (students, etc.). The Pro version is useful for people that need to use SlideMagic for real, share presentations in other formats with colleagues and clients, and need to brand slides in their own look and feel.

I will make sure that the payment engine works in a robust way first, then I will have to resort to modifying the web site with a better illustration of the positioning.

Social media is full of people arguing about masks. Part of the reason I think is that it is such a statement: “Look, I proudly wear one”, “Look, I proudly do not wear one”. I think masks deserve the benefits of the doubt, without becoming overly obsessed with it.

Leaving the debate to the side, and turning to graphics. My Twitter feed is full of diagrams such as this one below (found it here):

The masks and the faces look cute, but it is actually hard to understand the chart instantly. Using the SlideMagic approach to slide design (quick, to the point, good enough design), I came up with the following 2x2 that tries to make the same point:

Now the question is, did I put myself in the shoes of the audience? Maybe not every non-mask-wearing person is a former management consultant who prefers 2x2s… This slide is now available on the SlideMagic template bank, and you can access it free if you search for something like “mask” inside the app (v2.4.29 is the latest version).

See below how the desktop app adds dynamically generated slides to the search query. I am not running that on the server at the moment, since 1) it will take a lot of processing capacity that is now being done on individual user machines, 2) I do not consider the web store to be the optimal user experience: downloading slides, and then opening them in the app, but maybe I will change my mind at some stage in the future.