SlideMagic Blog

Israel is experiencing a very strong second wave of the virus. Its health ministry recently published data about where people get infected.

This graph does not tell the entire picture, I tried making a quick slide in SlideMagic:

What did I add?

• Providing the overall context: for many patients it is not known where they are infected, and many get infected at home (which are probably secondary infections)
• There is still important data missing. The most important one is how many people in total actually visit a place. Millions of people visit schools, thousands probably visit gyms and places
• We need to understand the impact on secondary infections (how big are the typical households that these people are coming from).
• Then there is the question about impact to society…

This SlideMagic slide is free, you can download it here. It is clearly an example of an analysis slide, rather than a visual to be presented to a large audience. While I am not a big fan of stretched 16:9 layouts, in this case I had to go for it to create space.

PS. My opinion re. the strong second wave in Israel? Yes, Israel got the virus under control and then reopened too quickly (school were the main source of infection initially). But, in the end I believe any country re-opening will go through the same process, may just a bit slower. I think Israel is 1-2 months ahead of other countries re-opening.

Waterfall charts are always an absolute pain to make. As my coding skills increase, I am getting more confident to add trickier things to SlideMagic ( tricker in terms of coding, not in terms of user interface). So, I have started to work on adding waterfall charts to SlideMagic. Below a screenshot of my development machine.

They should be in line with all the other data charts in SlideMagic, line up perfectly with the grid to make it easy to add data labels and incorporate them into the overall slide composition.

For many corporate users of SlideMagic, the killer feature might be the conversion of these simple waterfalls in a fully editable spreadsheet in PowerPoint/Excel.

Work in progress…

Update: the latest version of SlideMagic now as the waterfall functionality. It should work great in the app. PowerPoint conversions works as well except for the data labels. Let me know if you encounter any issues.

Photo by Robert Lukeman on Unsplash

After updating to the latest version of SlideMagic, your slide search results will no longer appear in SlideMagic blue, 4x3 aspect, but in your own personal colour palette, and in your own preferred screen size.

Unlike most template banks, SlideMagic now generates slides on the fly the moment when you search for them, rather than serving pre-fab files. This opens interesting opportunities for future features :-). Work in progress.

This is a neat visualisation of the COVID outbreak in Florida:

Why does it work?

1. It uses colour intensity to introduce another dimension of data in a column diagram: time, number of cases, and age range.
2. The colours are nicely chosen so the chart gives the impression of some sort of fire being lit (which is unfortunately the case).

These charts cannot easily be created in PowerPoint, this one is generated by some code. But you could give it a go in PowerPoint.

• Take a standard column chart in PowerPoint
• Make all the data series have the same value, the age brackets you want to use
• Set the gap between the columns to zero
• And now comes the hard part: manually add different colours to each data point. To select a data point click it twice in quick succession (one click will give you the entire data series wiping out your detailed painting effort in one go)

Here is a quick search for heat maps in SlideMagic, I added one design that sort of resembles the COVID chart. You can see how the new slide layout with the side title I introduced a few days ago comes in handy to create more vertical space for data.

Search results in the SlideMagic app show up as small screen shots of slides in SlideMagic’s blue colour at the moment. It would take a lot of bandwidth to send over the full slide designs when previewing templates.

I am making changes now on the server to make it possible that slide previews show up in your own colour scheme, with your own corporate logo on it, and in the layout you prefer(4:3, 16x9, black background, dark background).

The app will be upgraded first, after which I will make the feature available for paying subscribers on the web site as well. Users who prefer PowerPoint downloads will be able to download PPTX layouts with their own colours and logos already activated.

Work in progress.

Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash

While cleaning up an old computer, I came across a version of SlideMagic from probably 6 months ago. Back then I thought this was just about as good as it can get, comparing it now to version 2.4.3, I am almost embarrassed to have even released this. I hope I feel the same way about the current version in 6 months.

Only now, I am getting close to the feature set that was in my brainstorm notebook from almost four years ago. I remember coming up with most what is in SlideMagic 2.0 during Web Summit in Lisbon in 2016…

Things still to fix are:

• Connector editing (it works, but it is not intuitive and efficient enough)
• Making sure that previews of template slides show up in your own personal slide branding, rather than SlideMagic blue (without wasting a huge amount of bandwidth and/or processing power)

Photo by Abigail Keenan on Unsplash

I just pushed a big update to SlideMagic (2.4) to the server and it contains a brand new 16:9 slide layout, the slide title. Most monitors today are widescreen, but unlike movies, I think 4:3 slides look much better. Text lines that run across the entire slide are hard to read, and wide screen slides always force you to make very “stretched” slide layouts.

The side title is the best of both worlds. The title of the slide is moved to the left, and the slide contain area is scaled up now that it has more space at the top. It stays in a 4:3 ratio though. The footer and logo is also moved to the left, creating even more space. The entire design shows up without black bars on a wide screen monitor. Below is an example.

It follows an approach I already blogged about in 2016

SlideMagic has now 4 screen modes, and you can switch instantly between them:

1. Traditional 4:3 narrow
2. 16:9 wide screen
3. A 4:3 slide with an explanation panel to the side to leave notes for when you are not there in person to present the slide
4. The new and shiny 16:9 side title

Soon, I will rerun the PowerPoint conversion algorithms on the server to increase the size of the SlideMagic PoiwerPoint template database with 25%, each slide will now be available in the new format as well,.

(Hmm, the side panel needs some more padding, I will fix that [Fixed in 2.4.1]). There are a number of other new features introduced in version 2.4.

Every year Apple releases operating system upgrades for computers, tablets, and phones. Your apps and documents have the same content, but look slightly different. I am trying to push this concept to the world of presentations.

It has already happened (sort of). The slide-out panel to right changes the look and feel of your presentation without changing the content. Over time, I have made subtle changes to font sizes and layout proportions, which means that every SlideMagic presentation in the world will have a slightly different look. Switching to a dark slide background turn the colours of your presentation upside down (in a good way), far beyond just making the background black.

I will try to push this further, by adding more layout options , your slides will look entirely different, including the ones you made 6 months ago, but you can always switch back to another layout format.

Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash

I succumbed to pressure from some users of SlideMagic and added the ability to put a small border around a shape. In general I am not a big fan of borders (hence my initial hesitation). Most of the time a slide element just looks nicer when its shape is carried by its colour rather than a surrounding line. In nature, things do not have lines around them.

But.

I can see situations where you might need them. Especially when working with a grid of images of irregular sizes on white backgrounds (for example logos). Adding a tiny box around the shape makes the page look more balanced.

After installing the latest version of SlideMagic (V2.3.24), you will see a tick box appear under the colour menu. The tick does what it expects you to do. Let me know what you think, or update me if you find glitches in the .magic file rendering, or in PowerPoint conversion.

I will now also start using this new design element when I add new templates to the SlideMagic slide database.

While we are on user pressure, other requests that are being lobbied hard:

• One, just one, more colour…. Please.
• If we could somehow make something round (not boxy) in your app… Please.
• Yes, I know that the “connectors” are a bit cumbersome at the moment

Let’s see…

Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash

Some new features in version 2.3.23 of the SlideMagic desktop app:

• Super-fast responses when resizing your main window, or reshuffling slides in the story view, even if they contain big images. If the app does not need to re-render an image, it won’t. Rescaling slides is now done by your computer’s graphics processor directly, rather than my bespoke code.
• More clever image repositioning when you change the aspect rate of a shape by expanding and collapsing boxes. Still not perfect, but the app starts to do the right thing.
• Changing the slide aspect or background has now been added to the “view” drop down menu, so you can switch back and forth really fast without having to go through the settings menu.
• Subtle changes to the user interface, that makes the app look sharper on higher resolution displays.

The app will try to update itself in the background, or if you are impatient, go here to download the latest version immediately.

Photo by gdtography on Unsplash