SlideMagic Blog

… of slides.

It takes time and effort to create a good presentation. So when a next meeting comes up, it is tempting to borrow from a previous presentation that was already created. And typical presentations that are readily available are:

• Investor presentations of the last fund raising round
• Board presentations
• Product / sales presentations

We recently needed to pitch a tailored, one-off, joint service offering with a strategic partner. The first draft of our presentation:

• About company A (lots of slides, with an investor presentation flavor)

  • The market need for what company A does
  • The generic solution of company A to solve this market need
  • The team of company A

• About company B (lots of slides with a product presentation flavor)

  • The technology of company B
  • The results and achievements of company B

• What company A and B can do for you (1 - 2 slides)

Basically 2 generic company introductions, with a few minutes left to talk about the joint solution we were pitching to the client. We changed things around to focus almost everything about the specific problem of the client, and the company introductions were reduced to appendix background reading.

Be careful when using free images of people from Unsplash. Some of these have be come really popular. Marlene R. on a web site that rents ski and mountain bike gear, has the exact same head shot as Vignette F., one of the demo users of 9xchange.

You can find the image here: photo by Edward Cisneros on Unsplash. It shows up on page 1 of a search for “woman portrait”

…when you prompt it to generate your presentation, maybe you are on to something new! AI generators predict what to write based on information it ingested before.

Now what if your AI generator comes up with a brilliantly written pitch?

A feature that was long overdue: today we added a color picker to the SlideMagic settings page. Better late than never. Click on the big bar to reveal the pop up. If you want, you can still enter RGB codes. With the eye dropper, you can now sample colors anywhere on your desktop. Make sure to have V3.1.7 installed to use this feature.

(Proud of my daughter Mia who insisted to put this in, and actually wrote the code to do so herself)

I added 2 additional AI generators to SlideMagic, the produce a slide with some text and an image based on your prompt. One generator pulls the image from Unsplash, the other creates it from scratch. There is no update to your SlideMagic app needed to see the extra image generators.

See an example below:

Clickable links are the fundamental building blocks of the web page format that was developed in the 1990s. In the early days of the web, you could spend hours getting lost in clicking the blue links in text pages. In modern web design, these pure text links are less useful though.

Sometimes I see them as a reference to a core element of the story. Our product has a key competitive advantage that helps drive our amazing financials<.ink>. He user who clicks links is leaving your story line flow. Seeing messages in the wrong order, tripping up a sequence of big picture versus detail, and is probably not returning to the point she came from.

Web design guidelines in the 1990s also prescribed not to add the work “link” to a URL, but rather put descriptive text: “the 1996 financial results” so that Google and other web search engines would index the page correctly. The result is a page where the reader never is completely sure where it ends up when clicking a URL.

How do I use plain text links? Mainly for references, in the same way academic papers use numbers to refer to relevant resources. A home page of a company, a link to a photographer for credit, download links for documents, references to previous blog posts. And often, I violate the 1990s guide line and call the link what it is, a link, so that the reader knows what to expect.

I just returned from my summer break and will start picking up blog posts again. (Looking at the date, this month is the 15th anniversary of this blog…)

I swapped the DALL-E image generation engine for a different one, and the quality of the AI-generated images in SlideMagic has improved dramatically. Prompt and responses behave similarly to Midjourney. Below an example of a few quick prompts. (I on purpose forced the 1950s vibe on the last 2 images)

Make sure to have version 3.1.5 installed to see the new image engine. There is a cost associated with generating these images, hence this feature is only available to SlideMagic Pro subscribers. Other AI-related functions (slide and story line generation) are free for all users.

A few months ago, I added a DALL-E AI-image generator to SlideMagic. AI-generated images can be great for presentations:

• You can get very precise in defining what you want to see, much more so than browsing endless stock images search results that are not exactly right
• You can make images look visually consistent across a presentation

The DALL-E engine is not accurate enough though. Especially when it comes to humans/faces. Midjourney is doing a far better job at this but is not (yet) providing 3rd party API access to its engine, the only way to get images out is via a web-based interface.

I am starting to look into deploying the same open source models that are actually the basis of Midjourney, directly into SlideMagic. You can see the results below and they look very promising. More to come.

Image found with an automated prompt to a stock image site

Open-source AI-generated image

Very poor result from DALL-E

See the image below. I am blending AI-generated slides and images, and things are not completely right yet…