SlideMagic Blog

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.

I am (was) a casual Photoshop user. Now and then, I need a tool like this to take a background out of an image, or project een image on a 3D object such as a well.

For more than a decade, I have been pulling my hairs out every time I tried to use the program. I am a pretty skilled computer / software user, but I never managed to get over the dip of becoming an efficient user. In addition, the hefty subscription charge that was introduced does not really make sense for light users such as me.

Now, in my role as coder of my own presentation design app, I actually need a PS-like tool again to manage images that need very precise dimensions and DPIs (something irrelevant in PowerPoint). An inability to create a simple background image that scales on retina displays @2X in less than half hour with the final blow.

So I tried Sketch and everything was done within 5 minutes without the need for any tutorial. Creating the background, adding text, adding shapes, scaling, exporting. Highly recommended!

Sketch is a role model for SlideMagic. The software was started as a graduation project (actually by a student of the same university I got my Computer Science degree), and then moved slowly but surely over the course of a decade to become a market leader.

For a small company that is just starting out selling, it is impossible to reach out to the world. Not enough people, not enough money, not enough time.

Think about something that people usually use in manufacturing: economies of scale. One approach: invest a huge amount of fixed cost to build a massive plant that then can churn out products at a very low cost per unit (huge fixed cost / huge production volume). The other approach is specialisation. By focussing on just one tiny product in a tiny product segment, you might get to the same scale for that product as big competitors do who have to worry about 5,000 other items.

The same is true in sales pitches. You can scatter yourself and pitch clients in different industries, different continents, of different sizes. Or you can just focus on one industry, learn the “language” the people speak there, understand their problems, get referrals to from one happy client to another.

Which sector? Obviously it should make sense given your product. But after that, it is probably up to you. I guess that most companies that follow this approach got there by coincidence. Somehow you start winning pitches and getting leads in one sector and run out of time to focus on another.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

When someone asks me for an introduction to my network with an idea that needs to be pitched, I noticed that I can be as effective in explaining the basics of an idea in a few lines in an email as an entire slide deck.

Why?

I really think about my “audience” (usually a friend or business relationship that has a lot of prior knowledge or interest in the thing I am pitching, otherwise I would not bother to make the introduction). Out go the buzzwords, the market stats, directly raising the points that are unusual, surprising, unexpected, to someone who has a decent understanding of this type of business.

Personal recommendations can be much more powerful in an informal email between friends. You cannot put “she was only the junior assistant on the team, but believe me, she single-handedly delivered that project” on a slide.

You can raise risks in an honest way that are not always detrimental to the pitch: “the whole thing hinges on whether they can get product costs down, but I think they have a good shot at it”.

Next time when you write a pitch deck, ask yourself the question, what would a friend who is doing you a favour have to write in the cover of the email? Read the resulting text, and maybe it inspires you to change your pitch deck as well.

Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash

Yesterday I managed to get the Windows version of SlideMagic 2.0 running, generated by a script that eats the same code as the Mac version, but now saving a .EXE file instead of a .app. This means that I can soon open a limited beta testing program across all platforms.

The next challenge is to get certified as a reliable developer, Apple in particular puts up all kind of barriers to installation of apps that have not been vetted.

Two by two matrices are a popular tool rank options. Watch out when to use them though:

1. Do you actually have 4 distinct options that can be grouped according to 2 axes? Many situations have only 3 options, where the 4th option that is suggested by your framework is actually not meaningful in reality.
2. If you pass the first test, make sure you set the axes right: the most favourable scenario in the top right, the least attractive options in the bottom left, the other two the “can’t have the best of both world” scenarios.

Below is an example of a 2x2 used in an article about software lock-in I stumbled across. Flipping the axes makes the diagram a lot clearer.

The original diagram

I quickly created reworked the axes in a SlideMagic 2.0 diagram below: