SlideMagic Blog

This happens often, you work on a presentation for weeks, and then 1 day before the deadline, you throw everything away and start from scratch finishing the thing in just a few hours.

No, you did not do anything wrong those first weeks. In fact, it is because of the work you put in, that you can finally write your story down exactly as it should be. If you started the day before the presentation, you would never get there.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

A piece in the WSJ states that WeWork investors were turned off by ‘sloppy’ IPO filings.

Consistency and accuracy are the #1 requirement for any investment document. As soon as a potential investor needs to stop looking at the content of the business and start worrying about whether the numbers are correct and add up, you probably lost the deal. Trust is paramount. Investment is a leap of faith, and it is impossible to check 100% of all the data before writing the check. If you find some things that look incorrect, there might be more.

The WSJ article does not mention that there were actual errors in the report, just things missing. Details of private jets are not the most important I think, it is the data that allows you to construct how the business actually works: new location, mature location, and that multiplied by the roll out. Every investor presentation boils down to a story that ultimately gets translated into a spreadsheet by someone. You need to spoon feed the right information, without explicitly providing a finished financial model. The latter would enable investors to start “salami slicing”, turning all assumptions down and explaining you why the valuation of your business is too high using your own Excel model.

In the case of WeWork, there was clearly an “elephant in the room” question, and investors needed an answer to it, which they did not get.

Dragging and dropping across multiple application windows looks easy, but from a development point of view it is tricky to get right. I think I managed to get it to work for SlideMagic 2.0. In the same effort, I removed the clipboard in story view, that was a hack that I had to use in the web-based SlideMagic 1.0. A hack, because it was weird and confusing to use. No more need for it now.

Beta users should receive the update to their software automatically.

Photo by Joyce McCown on Unsplash

Over the past week I have been stress testing SlideMagic 2.0, and added 2 important features:

• Support for multiple windows. Open presentations side-by-side and copy elements back and forth. This is a strong advance of desktop app over browser-based software. Copy-pasting is still fragile here and there, work in progress.
• The ability to split a grid row or column in 2, which allows you to change the layout of a slide quickly without rebalancing the grid. Grid manipulations now work super-fast and intuitive.
• I have installed in-app analytics to see where beta users get stuck. As a beta user, you automatically opt-in to usage data gathering, the commercial version will have the opt-out option.

Beta users can simply go the cloud.slidemagic.com, log in, and download a new version of the app.

People use the same software to create them, but they are very different.

Project documents:

• Full of detail, assumptions, footnotes (“Harry wants to make sure that everyone knows that the data does not include South America”), disclaimers
• Many authors (captains, holders of the pen)
• Team members have seen page 25 over and over again (“ Why does it still say $23m profit there?)
• No problem editing them live on Google Docs with 5 people in 4 different locations
• Aesthetics can be compromised in order to squeeze that extra row in
• The has agreed on a way forward through discussion, now let’s write it down on the pages

Presentations:

• Introduce an audience for the first time to a story
• The audience still needs to be convinced of the way forward
• Usually one person delivering a carefully crafted pitch
• Poor aesthetics can definitely harm the effectiveness of the pitch

SlideMagic 2.0 will address document type number 2.

Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash

Years ago I started SlideMagic 1.0 “brain washed” by “modern” application design: cloud, tablet-friendly, SAAS, an always up to date version of software running in the browser.

Bit by bit, I am reverting to a 1990s setup for SlideMagic 2.0, focused on a desktop application with a selected cloud-tweaks:

• Design apps need to be super snappy and fast, latency because of saving stuff in a database that sits at the other end of the world is not ideal
• Presentations do get edited on planes that still do not have 100% WiFi coverage
• Presenting a presentation on a screen that is dependent on a live internet connection is risky, yes even in 2019.
• Having multiple windows on a screen and copying, pasting, dragging things across is actually useful (not yet implemented in SlideMagic 2.0). It is funny to see the developer discussion on bulletin boards where people are waking up to the challenges of managing multiple windows of the same application. Something web designers usually do not have to do.
• Storing things in a tried and trusted local file system solves security headaches and is good set up for when creating documents: finding things, copying, pasting. (Long-term storage and archiving is a different story)

Photo by Matthew M on Unsplash

A critical feature of any presentation app is the management of screens when presenting for a live audience. The presentation needs to show up on the big screen, and if possible, the presenter windows with the slide count, next slide preview, and timer needs to pop up on the secondary monitor.

Messing with monitors under the stressful time pressure of standing in front of a waiting audience requires serious stress testing. I am now doing this for SlideMagic 2.0. Pulling out monitor cords mid-presentation, sticking them back in, closing windows. I removed many bugs, but there are still a few left (the dual operating system set up is causing some additional challenges).

Soon, I will have ironed them out all. But as a precaution, I might not go as far as PowerPoint or Keynote where the user does not see the presenter and audience windows explicitly. I will leave them visible as non-maximised windows so the user can find them and move them around if Murphy’s Law strikes.

To be continued.

Apologies for the quiet blog this week. I am extremely busy ironing out the SlideMagic 2.0 app. This week the focus is on tightening the integration with the Windows and Mac operating systems:

• Designing app and file icons that look good and stand out next to other desktop icons (clutter)
• Linking those icons with the ‘.magic’ file extension on a computer
• Making sure double clicking icons, recent files, recent files in the dock, etc. works
• Certifying the app both with Apple and with a certification agency for Windows so that double clicking an installer does not generate scary security warnings
• Adding SSL security to file downloads
• Accept-cookie banners, and other regulatory issues

To be continued. Beta testers can check in now and then to download a later version of the installer, I am putting a new one up almost every day now.

I am ready to release a useable version of SlideMagic 2.0 to a very small group of users. There is an app for both Windows and Mac. If you are interested, you can sign up here: http://cloud.slidemagic.com/beta/apply, and I will let you know in the coming days (maybe week) if you made it to the very first beta test group.

In the not too distant future, there will be a broad/no application beta test program, but at the moment I am keeping things small to make sure I have the bandwidth to support early users.

Photo by Abbie Bernet on Unsplash

This list of resources might come in handy for anyone who is considering learning how to code from scratch, or like me, wants to get back into things again. Your objective could be

1. to land a job as a developer,
2. have a startup idea and you want to build it, at least build a prototype in a low risk way without the pressure and money required to hire professional developers
3. you just feel a bit technology illiterate and want to acquire basic coding skills just as an interest.

For me it started actually with number 3, that slowly turned into objective 2. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, you could simple turn on a computer enter a few lines of simple code and get a computer to do things. Now there is actually a bit more ‘overhead’ required before you have a basic piece of code running that can take an input and do something with it.

Option 1. and 2. are very different. Being a developer inside a huge organisation, and at the receiving of incoming feature requests by others is different from building a project that is really yours. Option 1 can actually be very similar to a regular admin job (a ‘cog wheel’ inside a big machine).

Thinking a bit ahead, I think that ultimately I will not be the person to keep un coding SlideMagic if it ever becomes a big and successful operation, but I am convinced that it is very hard (maybe impossible) to run a technology company if you yourself are completely illiterate in the world of coding.