[quote=“Rob_Polding, post:223, topic:478, full:true”]How do you cope if you cannot use your computer to do the presentation?
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Since I never use animations (not cool for my audience) I used to always export presentations as PDF and project them. Even when I have control of the “projector”. Even when using PPT files, they should be renamed PPS so that the PowerPoint UI never appears on the display.
Of course if you need PowerPoint, don’t just export Keynote decks as PowerPoint without inspecting them with PowerPoint first as they never export exactly.
I have a few… Overcast is probably my most used. Affinity Designer is my guilty pleasure, and sometimes a work tool, and Sling TV replaced my cable subscription. I also spend a lot of time in PowerPoint.
Pro presenter is pretty cool, but it is definitely not the tool for the Everyman, I would recommend emailing renew vision and getting a trial licence.
Most of my presenting these days is for c-suites so I don’t generally have to worry about using someone else’s computer, they let me use mine. It can import ppx quite easily but I cannot export it. That said in a pinch you can export slide jpgs but any fancy graphics are rendered flat.
I would also agree with @Lars about needing fancy graphics, whenever I do a conference talk or anything I have to do in advance I just use PowerPoint and keep it simple.
A few years ago I had an edge case and needed this tool and I loved it, it’s useful for doing multimedia presentations, rather then slides. There is value in being able to embed my live video feed and telestrate over it, or slave a few versions together so that I can present the same presentation slides, at the same time in several languages.
Pro presenter is not something I really recommend to people, it’s just what I know and love, but I have always taken issue with the MS suite for some reason
Time Machine. This is possibly cheating a bit, since you could consider it part of the operating system, but Time Machine was and still is, absolutely a game changer for using a Mac. Now it’s considered obvious that you backup your Mac, but before Time Machine came around almost no one backed up their computers. At all. I loved the old space wormhole animation, I still love that I can grab a specific version of a document, that I don’t have to worry about things not being backed up, that I can plug in the USB drive and forget that it’s ever there. Time Machine is efficient, effective, and one of the things that sets the Mac apart from every other platform, including iOS. In fact, I’d argue that iOS should have a Time Machine equivalent to consider it a “pro” environment, ready for true professional work.
Second to Time Machine, but in the same vein, is Spotlight. When Tiger came out Spotlight was a radical game changer. Google was shipping their “Google Desktop” app that would try to do something similar, but Spotlight was integrated into the operating system at the kernel level. When I read Siracusa’s original review of Tiger I was blown away how deep Spotlight went. When I first installed Tiger, I was impressed by how fast and efficient Spotlight was, even in it’s early incarnations when it ran in the menu bar and had to chug a bit before showing you results. It was still far, far faster than searching through documents without an index.
Now Spotlight is so fast you don’t even notice it running, and it indexes everything you’ve got. Third party apps are great, and I use a bunch of them, but for me, the reasons I stay on the Mac are related to the work Apple put into the included functionality of macOS.
Maybe I’d put Spotlight first and Time Machine second. It’s a toss up.
Between my programming days as a kid and my bigger projects today, it was Visual Basic for Applications that solely fulfilled my programming itch for many years through university and as an engineer.
I’ve now moved on to Google Sheets for that side of my programming, with its excellent database-like formulae and javascript backing. This is partly fuelled by my work place not paying for the Mac version of Office.
Even though everyone loves to hate it now, I’m gonna say…iTunes. Around 2004 I was fed up with the hideousness of MusicMatch Jukebox and WinAmp, downloaded iTunes for Windows, & was so impressed by the clean and elegant UI. Within a year I’d bought my first iMac—a computer that wouldn’t look awful in my small studio apartment—hooked it up to my stereo and ran it usually with the visualiser in full screen l. I ripped my whole CD collection and eventually moved everything to the Mac.
For me it’d be Sublime Text. I started learning to code at age 18 (2011~) - since then it has been my code text editor of choice. I’ve spent hundreds of hours on it. It might not be a Mac application (cross-platform C++) but it looks and performs very well. I’m actually embarrassed to say that I am far from a power user of it even after all these years… but it’s been with me for almost ten years. Maybe I should read the official documentation one of these days.
Probably the Brave (or Chrome) browser, with nearly three dozen extensions customizing the experience (and probably another 50 sitting unactivated until needed).
One other great thing about iTunes - 14 years of listening with 25k+ tracks have seeded enough info. for Apple Music to be practically flawless in its recommendations.
I use them all regularly. Here’s A-J of what’s currently turned on (I have a lot more installed but not turned on until I need them, like Full Page Screen Capture, or dotEPUB, which turns a webpage into an ebook):
1Password
Allow Right Click: Re-enable the possibility to use the context menu on sites that overrides it.
Allow Copy: Allow Copy will re-enable select, copy, paste and right click in any webpage, overriding site settings
BehindTheOverlay: One click to close any overlay on any website.
Decentraleyes: Protects you against tracking through “free”, centralized, content delivery.
DuckDuckGo: “Privacy, simplified. Protect your data as you search and browse. Permissions are to block hidden trackers lurking everywhere.”
EXIF Viewer: Quick access to EXIF data of any image you view
Fontanello: lets you select text, see font/style
Google Translate
Google Voice
Imagus: Enlarge thumbnails, and show images/videos from links with a mouse hover
Improve YouTube!
Just Read: customizable reader extension duplicating Safari Reader mode
Safari is more locked down, so there are only a tiny fraction of extensions compared to Chromium-based apps like Chrome and Brave. The extension situation on Safari is fairly dire anyway. There used to be (only) 2 extensions that let you see EXIF data on web pages, for example, but not only were they much clunkier than Exif Viewer but newer versions of Safari broke those extensions several months ago, they never got updated, and now there isn’t a single EXIF viewing extension that works in Safari.
For speed, privacy and compatibility I pretty much resort to Brave, which is most of Chrome anyway but with privacy enhanced plus its own ad-blocker built in (which you can of course supplement with other ad blocker extensions from the Chrome extension store).