SlideMagic Blog

Steve Jobs used to say that users don’t really know what hey want, because they are lacking the experience to judge something they have never tried before. My presentation app SlideMagic is a bit like that, taking a pretty bold and different approach to presentation design.

Having said that, there is an opportunity for me to listen to users now that the engine is out of the car and separated in its individual components before I put it together again for the development of SlideMagic 2.0. I spotted the obvious shortcomings of version 1.0, which are 99% related to the user interface and the way you interact with the program.

So, if there is other feedback you have about SlideMagic 1.0, now is the time to speak up. I will for sure listen, I might take them into account, or not (for design and/or practical reasons). Feel free to fire away at jan at slidemagic dot com.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

A VC friend told me that she asked a startup to stop the pitch presentation because of nauseating animated slide transitions (true story). No, the pitch did not stop, it just continued without the slide show. I don’t think it cost the startup a lot of points, except maybe a small doubt about judgement when presenting to investors, strategic partners, or major customers.

Big sweeping animations for the sake of animations to “add a little sparkle” to your presentations have the opposite effect:

• It puts the audience in a non-serious “giggle” mode when you want them to be dead serious about your business
• They take time, especially in slide transitions, “oh, here it comes again”, just when you are about to make that killer statement that will win over the audience. Also, quickly going back to slide 3 with the team bios will be delayed by 5 flipping slide transitions.

So never use animations? It depends.

For very complicated diagrams it can be useful to build up a slide slowly, adding complexity step by step. In these cases, I rely on “animations”, but usually do not implement them as animations. Rather, I duplicate slides and add additional elements on each slide. The audience does not notice the difference, my deck can still be sent as a PDF, and the lazy VC who does not bother to engage the PowerPoint slide show model will still get the message.

And of course, if you are Steve Jobs. That iPad dropping in between an iPhone and a Mac using the “anvil” effect worked pretty well.

Technology has become very powerful over the past few decades, and we could use it for all kind of things presentations: AI-powered template engines, 3D-animated slide transitions, sophisticated online multi-team collaboration, multi-media story narrations, searchable image databases with millions of stock photos.

Still, the problems we have as presenters are pretty much the same as they were in 1992:

• Quickly jotting down an idea on a slide
• Finding a slide that you made last week
• Getting that projection screen to work

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

For years and years I have used templates, libraries, plug-ins, and tools to try to make my web sites and apps work. But it always requires compromises. That PDF or PowerPoint conversion is a bit of, the blog looks good but I could have been better.

It is incredibly satisfying to write the things directly now. Dragging and dropping slides (from click, to drag, to drop), writing shapes into a PDF file one by one, cropping image bitmaps and being completely in control (and responsible) for image optimisation (file sizes, processing time).

Photo by roman raizen on Unsplash

Below are two screens of SlideMagic 2.0, all work in progress (the careful viewer can spot the bugs). The new app will be how the first one should have been: slide design will be mostly the same, the UI will be a lot better to work with. (No, not April’s fool…)

This tweet resonated with me:

Many of the world’s best presenters are “high functioning introverts”. A presentation gives them the space to air their thoughts without interruption, the ability to carefully craft your story so that it comes out perfectly, taking into account all those possible nuances, contradictions, and considerations.

Photo by Paul Green on Unsplash

A thought triggered by my recent attempts at refreshing my 1992 coding skills, learning how to ski, and expanding my musical abilities from keys to the guitar.

Acquiring knowledge can be relatively easy: after you see an animation for 2 seconds you understand why the Moon is facing the earth with exactly the same face for the past few million years. See it, and snap, it has been added to your understanding of the world.

In the world of presenting and design, we can also acquire knowledge: white space, eye contact, one message per slide, “snap” and move on, right? Not so fast, presenting and design are skills, and the only way to master a skill is actually doing it.

Eye balling your slides in a cafe and imagining how you are going to present them is one thing (‘here I will make the point that the competition will never be able to catch up’). Doing it on stage with a crackling microphone while being distracted by a question is different.

Dreaming up a slide is easy, but how do you get these numbers to round in the Excel chart, and how on earth do I incorporate that comment of the CEO in this chart that is already pretty full?

You know that you are getting somewhere with learning a skill when your brain starts to resist, that means that you are getting into new territory as you push it to make new neural connections. Most people give up here, but those who don’t will be surprised when they pick up things again after a night of sleep.

I have returned from a wonderful ski holiday with the family and can pick up the blog again. Going forward this blog might change character a bit when compared to the past 11 years. I always have been writing pretty much about things that occurred me while doing my work, which was designing investor presentations. That is changing now as I am focusing on coding version 2.0 of SlideMagic. That does not mean that I plan to turn my blog into a Javascript tutorial though. It will be an interesting audit trail of my efforts to get this app on the rails.

Image via Wikipedia

Totally, totally, not on topic, I am giving you a flavour of the sort of things I am breaking my head about. Javascript powers websites with unreliable connections, and in 99% of the cases it is not a big deal whether all images are rendered exactly on time. For a presentation software that renders on screen slide shows for a few hundred people or needs to produce a pitch deck in crisp PPTX or PDF, it is crucial that the right image is rendered correctly and appears in the right order, you are happy to wait a few extra milliseconds if you have to (since there is no risk of a million bored people clicking away from you ads).

Web browsers basically run like headless chickens, if one bit of rendering encounters a problem or delay, they will quickly jump to the next one, try again later, try something else. There are a bunch of Javascript commands to try and keep track of this asynchronous chaos. The theory of these is easy to understand. A decent practical explanation though, is impossible to find anywhere online (believe me, I tried).

So, here is a cheat sheet for myself, that maybe gets picked up by Google and can help a lot of people. I left out all the theoretical explanations, just the raw example code.

function unpredictable(order) {
  return new Promise(function (resolve) {
    var resultValue = 'Result from call ' + String(order)
    setTimeout(() => resolve(resultValue), Math.random() * 1000)
  })
}

function ASAP() { // Random numbers, as values come out as soon as they are available
for (let i = 1; i <= 10; i++) {
  unpredictable(i).then(resultValue => console.log(resultValue))
}}

I watched a few performances of the annual play of my daughter’s class over the past few days. I noticed that the more performances the class has played, the better the kids know their lines, but, the faster they start to speak. Partly because they have to make less effort to remember the line, and probably partly because they are getting tired and feel like “let’s get this scene over with”.

Something to think about in our presentations as well: you know it inside out, you might get tired from explaining your own story again, but, the audience is sizing you up in a first impression.

Photo by Massimo Sartirana on Unsplash