[…] A while ago I blogged about buying “the clicker”, aka the Targus Wireless presenter tool. If you do not know what it is, let me explain. You know how sometimes when people are doing a Power Point presentation they walk away from their computer and just have that little gizmo in their hand that let’s them advance slides remotely? Yeah, it’s that thing. Mine was a chepo, plastic thing with a few rudimentary buttons and a built in red laser pointer. […]

Yeah, I am teaching windows specific stuff. In fact MS Office is part of the curriculum. I wouldn’t mind using Mac stuff, but the problem is that I don’t own one.

Thanks for the suggestion though. I will definitely check out the iWorks presentation thing if/when I ever get one. :)

I have developed “Professional” PowerPoint Presentations which are used by a few companies as sales presentations. Although I can use PowerPoint, I cannot stand it. It is, in my opinion, the worst program in the Office suite. I am speaking in regard to Office 2003; PowerPoint in 2007 is DRAMATICALLY different and I should say MUCH better than its predecessor, in my opinion.

This is all to lead up to this: I purchased the iWork suite for my Mac a few months ago. I’d used the word processor (Pages) and was VERY impressed with it; I’d also tinkered with the new spreadsheet application (Numbers). I hadn’t even really opened the presentation software (Keynote) until one day this week when I was asked to give a 20 minute presentation to a medium-sized community group. I thought, “well, I KNOW PowerPoint, but Apple has a pretty good track record of impressing me with their apps so… I’ll give it a whirl”

In 2 hours I’d built a presentation that was more attractive than anything I’d ever done in PowerPoint. All of Apple’s animations and transitions are significantly higher resolution than those available in PowerPoint. More importantly, the organization of the program and how it presents its pre-made templates is very nice. Overall, the program is organized much more intuitively than PowerPoint and I feel enabled me to make a great presentation VERY easily.

Keynote has a very nice “presenter mode” which shows on the presenter’s screen (all optionally) the current slide, the next slide, a clock, a timer (which starts as soon as you advance from the first slide) and presenter’s notes.

All new Macs come with the little Apple remote. When I went to give my presentation, I found it worked very well. With it, during the presentation, I was able to turn volume up and down, easily advance and reverse slides and, by pressing the “menu” button, I was presented with a sort of overview of the slides so that I could choose what slide to show next, without my audience seeing that I was skipping a few; that is, I didn’t just hit “next,next,next” while making excuses about how those didn’t apply or something…

I know (think?) you are teaching Windows-specific stuff, but I thought you might want to consider using a Mac and trying out Keynote for your presentations. The Mac can run windows alongside OS X (with Parallels or VMWare) and it does it very gracefully, particularly with Parallels’ Coherence mode.

Just a suggestion.

-Kiyu