SlideMagic Blog

This weekend and family and me joined a professional group of musicians to give a performance on stage. It was interesting to watch how the band leader made sure all of us delivered the best of our abilities, all which apply to the world of delivering presentations as well:

• The confidence boost to the singer who wakes up with a sore throat the day of the performance: reminding her (based on decades of experience) that when the body has to perform, it will (and it did.
• Spotting and eliminating small logistics hick ups that do not matter in a rehearsal but can kill the flow of a live performance. Have water available to clear dry throats, making sure nobody trips over cables, and pulls out cables of instruments, where do people stand and move, where do people go when they are not part of a song, how do transitions between songs happen.
• And finally, a small rerun of the set lists in a quiet room. Just focusing on the list of songs (which you already know) for a second is like rerunning a 30 minute rehearsal in your head, the mind gets the right focus.

Image credit: @yulesh

SlideMagic 2.0 has almost reached the point where I am happy with the features for a first release (icon and image search went in last week). Now it is time to focus attention again to what will make SlideMagic stand out: templates for presentations.

I have started to add slides with images to the template database, inspired by the slides that are for sale in the PowerPoint template store. This is also a good stress test to see how the app with big files full of images.

Work in progress, this will take a bit of time to get right.

Over the next coming days there will be another update to SlideMagic 2.0: CPU-intensive tasks such as converting a presentation to images, PDF or PowerPoint format, or preparing a file for the printer will no longer block the main process. I am getting the hang of managing dozens of different processes in parallel.

In version 1.0 in SlideMagic, we were dreading doing these intensive computations on our server, it would take a lot of processing power if the app were to scale (hence the imperfect solution of emailing back PowerPoint conversion a few hours later, far too late for the meeting you actually needed the slides in).

In version 2.0, this is no longer an issue, since SlideMagic uses the enduser machine to do the hard work. This fundamental architecture will enable me to scale up with less investment, but more importantly, a smooth user experience as everything happens instantly on your machine.

Photo by Alexander Popov on Unsplash

I am working to integrate images and icons into SlideMagic 2.0. The workflow for both in current presentation design tools is seriously broken:

• Search for an image
• Save it on your hard drive
• Find it on your hard drive
• (If relevant : waiting to upload it again to your online tool)
• Crop and change colour (especially challenging for SVG icons), can be very slow and cumbersome in online image editors
• Get the image/icon to line up with the rest of your slides
• Finding the link to the photographer you need to give credit to (if required)

All of this can soon happen directly in SlideMagic 2.0, which in turn can churn out a perfect conversion to PowerPoint if needed.

It was a painful process with lots of trial and error and wasted trees, but SlideMagic 2.0 beta users can print their presentations as of v2.19 without using the PDF conversion bypass. I am still working on improving the resolution without maxing out on memory, and fixing small formatting issues (exact centering of the slides), but the basics are there.

For those who are interested. In the beginning of my coding project I was cursing this parallel processing of lines of codes, no I actually start using it to my advantage by speeding things up. PowerPoint and PDF conversion will soon move to a background process.

Photo by James Pond on Unsplash

You remember those evenings in the 1980s, where a family would invite you to come and see their vacation snaps that they put on the 35mm slide carrousel in a dark living room. Sixty minutes of “then we did this, then this happened, then that projected on the wall with the art replica temporarily removed.

The host family had great fun and finally could use the equipment they had bought 6 months ago. The guests, less so. For them, the images were not linked to actual experiences and memories, a picture of a car with a flat tire, is well, a picture of a flat tire.

It is always good to take a step back and asking yourself whether you are inviting your colleagues to this type of event when you update them about the status of your project.

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

In case you have not seen the 2-minute speech of the New Zealand prime minister:

Obviously, the objective of this speech is not to get you to remember all the stats, it is 2 minutes of one message: “I did a lot’. It is very effective though, and she must have gone through several practice runs to get the take right.

Now; if you take the same information load, allocate 45 minutes of time, improvise the delivery, and replace the flashing words by full-length bullet points, you get a more common update presentation. Which one do you prefer?

I don’t think many people are still printing presentations in 2019. The one exception: bankers pitching to institutional investors. The latter still like to flip along (or ahead) with the presentation and make notes in the margin.

Still, I want SlideMagic 2.0 to be fully rounded app, so I start the work on its print function. Printing is often ignored by many application development frameworks. The feature is not that important, it is tricky to develop and get right, but it has to be done.

A positive side effect is that I am coming up with a better way to convert presentations to PDF without the need to rely on open source libraries, and I can soon support conversions as a parallel process that no longer will block the main application process (something that can be annoying especially if you used large images).

(Beta testers can get around the current lack of the print feature by converting to PowerPoint or PDF and then print in those apps).

Photo by James Pond on Unsplash

Sparked by this tweet:

My guideline:

• Columns to show trends over time. The shape mimics that of a line chart, you don’t need much space for the column labels (usually years, or months)
• Columns for breakdowns. More horizontal space for complicated labels, and a stacked column is a more natural format than stacked bars.
• Bars to rank things. The shape mimics a “top 10” top to bottom list, and you can make more space for labels that usually describe things

In this case: bars are better than columns.

Photo by Sophie on Unsplash

SlideMagic slides always looked a bit different because of the Roboto Condensed font. A recognisable style, plus a narrow font that can hold a lot of text on one line. In the latest update for beta testers, I am putting Helvetica/Arial back as the default, making Roboto a second choice.

I see many users using SlideMagic as a starting point for a conversion to PowerPoint, as most of their colleagues have (yet) no idea with SlideMagic is. SlideMagic files with Roboto in them will gave unpredictable results for users who do not know how to install custom fonts on their machine.

Usability is #1. Hence, the switch, but with an option to fall back on Roboto that can get saved as your default font in the settings tab of the app.

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Unsplash