SlideMagic Blog

Being an introvert, I do not particularly like or benefit from visiting industry conferences. A few months ago, I made an exception and visited one about software (the new industry I am joining). One of the insights was in sales and marketing: young enterprise software companies benefit hugely from focusing on just one industry sector in the beginning. Not because their software is specific to their industry, but:

• Focusing on 1 industry allows you to get to know that sector really well from a sales perspective, you speak their language, understand their needs. Big companies with big sales departments can afford to do this for every industry sector, a tiny company, with a tiny sales department (probably just you) can do it as well (maybe better) for just one sector.
• Referrals is the strongest lead generator, and, if you are working in a specific industry, people are likely to recommend you. Referrals go between similar companies (biscuit manufacturer to soft drinks bottler), or up and down the chain (advertising agencies, food retailers).
• Design styles, the technical side of presentation design work, is likely to be similar as well in a specific industry sector. TED Talk big picture slides won’t get you very far in a private placement memorandum pitch to institutional asset managers for example. If your background is in art & design, the first one is you, if you are an engineer-turned management consultant, the second one will feel more comfortable.

For freelance presentation designers something similar works. Startup pitches are similar, and very different from let’s say a big corporate sales pitch, or a quarterly investor presentation. Within startup pitches, there are similarities between segments (for example biotech companies).

I have kept the beta tester group of SlideMagic 2.0 very small exactly for this reason: I am moving things around on the template server that will break access of older beta versions that are around. Sorry for this, a new version will become available soon.

The changes are needed to maintain a good search performance as the size of the template database grows and involves a lot more image-heavy slides. Also, I am working on the marketing site that will allow searching of templates for non-subscribers without the ability to download them, to get a preview of what is cooking in the kitchen.

A side-effect of this is that I will offer subscribers a web-based download option, useful for those who are not interested in using the new SlideMagic edit app (even if they should), but want the layout straight in PowerPoint format. The server is now able to turn .magic files directly into PowerPoint slides.

A happy 2020 to all of you!

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Thinking of 2020, I am working hard to make it the year that I get SlideMagic right. I think presentation software is one of the hardest user interfaces to innovate, given the big existing installed base (user interface, file format), and software offered by players with deep pockets that is from a technical point of view very good and pretty much offered for free.

My objective for 2020 is not the number of users, profits, revenues. I think this is where many VC-funded presentation startups have gone wrong, not taking enough time to get the product right and pushing for growth.

Instead, I want a handful of users that start using the product to keep using it. The early signs are very encouraging, but these are friendly people that tolerate the incidental bug, which obviously will not fly with a broader market. Ironing out bugs is one challenge, but the big lever I have is the template database, including the type of slides it offers, but more importantly, how it helps you search. Now that I got the slide editor pretty much done, I can devote most of my attention to this in the next year.

I am wishing all readers a fantastic holiday and the best 2020 possible.

Photo by Chris Moore on Unsplash

For the first time in months, I am spending more time designing slides than writing code as I am building up the template database. It is a great feeling to see all that hard work paying of now as I add one slide after another to the database at a very high speed.

This also puts me in a position to start thinking really what SlideMagic (maybe 3.0?) could do, now that I have a basic platform in place that can store/search templates, all listening to a uniform design layout. What if there are eventually thousands, and thousands of slides, keywords, concepts? Things can get interesting!

Yes, there is still the challenge of turning 2.0 into a proper company…

To be continued.

I just released version 2.1.25 of SlideMagic with more bug fixes and performance improvements:

• Better integration of copy-paste and other clipboard function with Mac OSX and Windows, enabling you to copy paste things between SlideMagic and other applications
• Fixed the mystery bug that stopped slide rendering when you flip an image
• Fixed an issue where crop rectangles would be reset after compressing an image
• Fixed an issue that could corrupt .magic files upon exiting the application (thank you, one of my frequent blog readers)

On the server, the browser now tells you that your password reset link has expired, rather than producing a generic message that something is not quite right.

I am starting to feel happy with the application as I am using it now myself really intensively to build the template database, but I am keeping the number of beta users small at the moment, just to make sure. One important decision that I need to make before expanding the user base, is the freezing of the file format, I am still pondering making potentially breaking changes here.

The update should install automatically in the background if you leave your existing SlideMagic app open in the background. Beta version from a few months ago have now expired as we move into 2020, please contact me if you have an issue re-starting the app.

Photo by Jeff Cooper on Unsplash

Today was another day of template building, I am reaching the point where the SlideMagic app starts to contain more slides than the SlideMagic template store that I host with Shopify.

I did some work on finding good portrait shots today. Although now there are many free photo sites around with abundant amount of images of people, it is still tricky to find the right photos to use in your presentation. Here are some of the filters I apply subconsciously as I go through hundreds and hundreds of images at high speed:

• Too much stock photo: you know what I mean
• Clothing mismatch: too fancy dress, very light outfit in a cold environment
• Trying too hard to pose
• Artistic shots of people who look unhappy, depressed, beautiful, but not for a business presentation
• Shots of people who look unnaturally happy
• A background that is too recognisable
• A screen with a message that is too recognisable, grabs too much attention
• Too pretty, cutesy
• Weird posing
• Trying too hard
• Background mismatch (a church, the Sahara) while checking your phone
• An outdated phone (this image was taken 15 years ago)
• Background too busy to add text, other visual elements
• The list goes on

Hopefully SlideMagic will save you the time I spent to find the right images.

P.S. For those who are interested in the cause of yesterday’s mystery bug that made items disappear in the small thumbnails on the left of the screen. Well, flipping an image (which I did on that particular slide) is a time consuming CPU operation, the computer starts it, but then goes on doing other things in parallel, one of which is scrolling the selected slide thumbnail in the visible part of the window (you see it sitting just at the bottom). The scroll stops the other slide rendering operations. And unlike pretty much anything in Javascript, there is no event to catch and manage this. A small 0.1s delay when needed solved the issue for now. That was 1 hour of yesterday’s day :-)

I am working hard on improving the template database at the moment. A re-write of the code on my server dramatically increased the speed at which I can add slides. It is fun to see it working: get a slide idea, quickly (hey, it is SlideMagic) create it, save, button, and boom: the slide shows up in search queries.

I am adding a lot of image slides at the moment, some of which are a bit cliche, but they should be part of any template database. The other effort goes into strategy consulting frameworks. Here I need to simplify many of them to make them fit into the SlideMagic philosophy. Some might say that they look too simplistic and less sophisticated. I would say that they are a lot easier to read, and a lot, lot, lot quicker to make.

Careful readers can observe the small glitches :-) Why is on that one slide, is that billboard not rendering in story mode, but it does in edit mode, and the same billboard renders in story mode perfectly fine on another slide…

Any slide that has a prime number of boxes on it higher than 5 creates a layout challenge. One, three, or even five boxes can still work, but more, it becomes cluttered.

Yes, can lay out boxes according to mathematical shapes. A heptagon distributes everything evenly. But it is a pain to figure the exact spacing out, but the more important drawback is the amount of slide space you lose. Beautifully arranged shapes that nobody can read. That is the reason why in SlideMagic, I did not even bother to put these types of shapes in.

So what to do? A few suggestions.

• Do you really need a slide with 7, 11, or 13 boxes? The best solution is to cut the thing up in 7 , 11, or 13 stand-alone slides that just make one point.

In some cases there might be no avoiding (for example when you negotiate a contract or some other deal that has 7 key agreement points).

• The obvious solution is to keep things simple and straight: just list the bullets

• You can do what this YouTube instructor did: add an 8th box to make the slide symmetrical. It could work in most cases, I would not give the design decision away though, but find a meaningful extra point

• You can use the bullet points as some sort of tracker, speak very briefly about it, then click through to the next slide that discusses the point in detail

Earlier beta versions had a 2020 expiration date, I uploaded V22 to the server that should install automatically. This version also includes lots of performance improvements and bug fixes, including how the app responds to going back and forth in full screen mode, and right click context menus.

Photo by Jeremy Lapak on Unsplash

Some more learning from last week’s music performance. When you think you have something memorised, you actually still have a long way to go.

Here is the process I went through with a pretty simple song, still it took time:

1. Hit the right chords when reading the chord letters on a piece of paper
2. Hit the right chords when starting the song from scratch, without paper
3. Consistently getting the chords inversions and finger positioning right (rather than making them up each time you remember to place a chord)
4. Being able to do the above with random interruptions, without starting from the start: a mistake (by you or a band member), a quick start-stop to rehearse a certain piece
5. Not thinking at all about chords anymore, just hitting the right thing based on the lyrics, music you hear around you.

When you wing a story on the fly, prompted by a slide that you see on the projector, you are at stage 1 when it comes to presentation preparation, and have 4 more steps to go.

Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash