The Mobile Presenter

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.

Last year, I came across the Satechi Bluetooth Smart Pointer Mobile Presenter and to my delight, it worked as advertised. Finally a "normal" remote control that worked with my iPad. It's so much nicer to use than the rather clunky iPhone or iPod with Keynote Remote on it.

And then Apple released iOS 7 and Keynote for iOS 2.0 and the Satechi remote stopped working. Bummer.

A few days ago, I received an email from Satechi support pointing out that things seem to be working again now with iOS 7.1 and Keynote 2.1, which triggered me to try it out again. Here's what I found:

Something that stood out from a bad presentation I had to sit through recently was the speaker's insistence on explaining to us what was coming next, why she chose a photo, where it was taken, that she'd tested the presentation in front of friends before (which is recommendable, of course), etc. This sort of meta information seemed very important to her but didn't really help the audience in understanding the presentation any better. In other words, it was extraneous information that only distracted from the actual presentation.