The Mobile Presenter

There is not the one way to do a presentation. Instead, there's a pool of recommendations, best practices, approaches, and tools that you can pick from for the unique circumstances of your next presentation. What works and what doesn't will depend on factors such as the audience and the topic, but also your personality as a speaker.

To illustrate that, I often share links to posts with recommendations by other speakers about how they create their presentations. A few days ago, I almost shared yet another such link, since I agreed with the author's general approach: Getting away from the computer to think about the main message of your talk, for example, and building a story arc. But then the article came to the fateful point where the author wrote words to the effect of after that, it can take me anything between 4 and 40 hours to write the slides.

"Write" the slides?

I'm a geek. I enjoy doing geeky things and I also enjoy watching fellow geeks doing or talking about geeky things. So a meet-up of Open Source geeks, such as FrOSCon, is an event I'm very much looking forward to all year.

I often find parallels between musicians and presenters. While they are both putting on a show (of sorts), they still need to come across as human to be able to connect with their audience. In that attempt, though, they sometimes share a bit too much.

Keynote for iOS has come a long way if you compare it with the very first version that came out with the original iPad back in 2010. Probably the most important feature that Apple added later was supporting a remote control.

However, this feature only works with the Keynote Remote app running on another iOS device. You can not use a regular remote control with iOS devices. That is, you could not do that until now. Enter the Satechi Bluetooth Smart Pointer.

The benefits of using a remote control (also called "clicker" or "presenter") to control the advancement of slides in presentation software should be obvious. Mainly, that you can be far away from your laptop and therefore better interact with your audience (instead of with your equipment).

Have you ever wondered how such a remote actually works?