Photo 36 1.jpg

I was the presenter for the Chicago chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) last night. This organization gets some real “heavies” like presenters from Microsoft and Google to do these talks, so it was an honor to be asked….and a little nerve-wracking as well! I mean, I’m a blog guy. What can I offer to IT professionals?

Thankfully, people seemed to enjoy the presentation (which I recorded on my Zoom H2–I’ll put it up online at some point soon). I’ve done a few talks in the past, but each audience has been different, so I’ve made a new presentation for each event. I think that this is one that I can “take on the road” if need be and just give a few tweaks here and there. I spent a good 10-15 hours putting it together, so hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to use the material again for another event.

Keynote ’09 rocks!

I am a big fan of Apple’s Keynote for presentations–it is significantly slicker than PowerPoint, and if you use any other Apple software (especially iPhoto, Pages, or iMovie) you’ll be right at home with the interface.

There are a lot of new features (especially for more advanced users), but one of my favorite developments is a Keynote Remote app for the iPhone (iTunes link). It requires Keynote ’09 to use it, but being able to use it is probably reason enough to upgrade to the latest version of Keynote. I can see my slides on the iPhone (meaning that I don’t need to constantly turn around and gaze at the screen–it’s amazing what a difference not having to do that makes for your presentation!) plus my presenter notes.

Presenter notes are things that you jot to yourself for each slide, and I use them all the time. Even though I already know what I’m going to say for the most part, having some prompts in front of me is really valuable. With this setup, you can see your notes plus your slides and advance from slide to slide with a simple swipe.

Here’s a little video demoing how this works:

Bass News Right To Your Inbox!

Subscribe to get our weekly newsletter covering the double bass world.

Powered by ConvertKit