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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:
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:
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.
This tweet exactly applies to SlideMagic:
SlideMagic had a few glitches, but unlike established software products, users that suffered got the CEO himself to add designs to the template bank, recover presentations, gave refunds after people claimed they ‘never intended to make that purchase’, deploy patches within a few hours, and say ‘thank you’ even in the very few cases where feedback was not worded that nicely.
I think SlideMagic is getting close to the finish line as a proper and robust product as I am using it intensely myself now. Thank you all for your patience.
Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash
Things are a bit quiet here on the blog, as I am using my annual blogging summer holiday to cleanup SlideMagic further. New features are frozen for the moment, as I am 100% focussed on making the app as stable as possible and have been posting regular updates frequently. If you are a frequent user of SlideMagic, you should now be running version 2.4.28.
One visible change I have made in the latest version is a slightly larger image zoom slider, you can see it in the screen shot below. I rotated the slider, it now appears vertically, allowing me to give it more space and make image zooming more precise.
Updates should install automatically eventually but you can force an update by downloading the latest version of SlideMagic manually.
This is a comment by my 15 year old daughter. She sees SlideMagic or PowerPoint as software that you can use to create your school project or make a photo compilation to share with your friends.
She is right. “Presentations” are mostly documents that capture an idea. Only a small percentage of these slides actually get presented on a screen in front of a live audience. “Presentation Zen”, TED Talks, Steve Jobs, and others have taught us how to make good live presentations, and SlideMagic can support this.
Now it is time to take on the quality of the other 95% of slides that get produced in businesses (and schools).
Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash
SlideMagic can switch back and forth between multiple layouts, and needs to handle rapid changes in the grid of a slide. As a result, aspect ratios of images get changed all the time, tripping up your carefully selected image composition. At the moment, the app is storing different crop and zoom levels for different aspect ratios, but that solution is not ideal. (You see how Squarespace gets it wrong with the banner image of this blog post).
I want to get to the point where a SlideMagic user can click a focal point of an image, after which the app will do the hard work of re-adjusting the crop automatically. Doing research, I see a lot of “AI” applications that can figure out what the focal point of an image should be, there seems to be nothing that deals with focal point-based cropping itself. The solutions I see, are ones where you can store multiple crops of the same image, after which the most appropriate one gets selected.
I started scribbling a manual algorithm to come up with reasonable compositions. Here are the first (manual but automateable) results applied to some cows on a beach in Africa, the first image is the original.
It works pretty well, on the the extremely horizontal one gets cropped too low, I would have shown a bit more sky on that one. Let’s see if we can get this to work, both in terms of the algorithm, and the user interface.