The Mobile Presenter

When you go to speak somewhere and you are offered a microphone, it's generally a good idea to use it. Keep in mind that the people running the event will be familiar with the venue and will know very well wether your voice needs to be amplified to be understood by the audience members in the back of the room.

You may be reluctant to use a microphone simply because you are not familiar with its correct use. It should be worth this small discomfort for the benefit of your audience, though.

One thing that I always stress in my workshops is that there's no excuse for going over time with your presentation. At a typical conference, this will quite obviously inconvenience your audience, since they may want to change rooms to attend the next talk, or take a bathroom break between talks, or grab a coffee. It also prevents the next speaker from setting up in time and may even derail the entire schedule of at least the conference track you're in. And even if you're the only speaker at an event, consider that people in your audience will have made plans for after your talk.

Fortunately, most speakers nowadays seem to have realised this and manage to finish in time; with their talk, that is.

Update: After some back and forth, the workshop is now scheduled for Saturday, April 19 at 1pm. Please double-check the schedule (aka Fahrplan).

Do hackers need communication skills? Why yes, they do. Hackers, by which I mean the good guys, often make important discoveries and need to be able to explain them. The NSA scandal is a prime example, but other issues (e.g. security issues in websites, routers, or smartphones) are found almost every day and their consequences are often hard to understand for the general public. So whether the result is a talk at a security conference or a press release, it's important that the hackers improve their communication skills so that they can explain their findings to an audience that is not intimately familiar with all the details.

At Easterhegg, the traditional meet-up of Germany's Chaos Computer Club over the Easter holidays, I'll do my little share and offer a "Hacker's Edition" of my Presenting for Geeks workshop.

This article may seem somewhat off-topic for this blog, but it is at least partially relevant for those of us who use their iPad for presenting:

One of the limitations of the iPad (and other iOS devices) is that you are stuck with the fonts that Apple provides. There is no official way to add custom fonts. I'm usually somewhat conservative in my choice of fonts anyway, but sometimes, it would be nice to have a fancy font for special effects.

A developer has now found a way to install custom fonts on devices running iOS 7. It is in no way officially sanctioned, so it may stop working at any time with a future iOS update. On the other hand, as I understand it, it's not really a "hack" either, since it uses a feature that was only introduced in iOS 7 (though maybe not for this purpose).

In any case, the app is called AnyFont and you should use it at your own risk.

Note: This article will not do PowerPoint justice since I do not have an Office 365 subscription - and without it, you can't edit presentations in this version of PowerPoint; you can only view and present them.

Rumours about an iOS version of Microsoft's Office suite have been floating around for a long time. Apparently, it was mainly held up by company politics. Now that Microsoft has a new CEO, some of those politics seem to have changed and Office for iOS is available from the AppStore. The price? The apps are free, but you need a subscription to Microsoft's Office 365 service to create new documents or edit existing ones. The service costs $10/€10 per month or $99/€99 per year for home use (other pricing options available for businesses and for students). This applies to all 3 apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).

I'm only going to look at PowerPoint here - without the subscription, so I'll only be able to use it to view PowerPoint presentations.