1. Run Through Your Presentation Before Presenting

PowerPoint and Keynote will play together, but they don’t always play well together. If you’re moving presentations between applications or even just between computers, give your presentation a good run through before showtime.

2. Test Out the Hardware

If you’ll be presenting with an external display, using external speakers or something similar, test all of this before your presentation. Your Mac’s screen will flicker as it adjusts screen resolution to match what it’s connected to (if you’re mirroring displays). Test all of this beforehand so you’re prepared and not dealing with unexpected complications.

3. Simplify Your Slides

This one is purely a stylistic suggestion, but you’ll be doing your audience a favor if you simplify the text on your slides as much as possible. Do you enjoy reading a lot of text when it’s displayed on your television? Neither do your viewers.

4. Use a Soothing Color Palette

Make you presentation stand out with a color palette that works well together. If you need some inspiration, visit Adobe’s Kuler website to see a variety of color palettes submitted by users. Search for one that fits your needs or upload and share your own.

5. Turn Everything Else Off

When you are presenting, make sure any unnecessary applications are closed. Growl notifications, incoming iChat messages and bouncing dock icons are not appropriate for a presentation. If you’re the type of presenter who uses a few slides but speaks at great lengths on each one, make sure your screensaver and sleep settings (if using a laptop) are disabled to prevent your Mac from accidentally going dark. You can adjust these settings in the Desktop & Screen Saver and Energy Saver panes of System Preferences (subscription required). Remember that portable Macs store energy saver settings differently when you use your battery and when you use your power adapter!

6. Presenting a Website? Load it Beforehand

If you’ll be presenting websites alongside your presentation, go ahead and load those beforehand. This will save you from wasting time while the pages load and will still be able to serve its purpose in your presentation even if you are unable to connect to the Internet when you are presenting. Better yet, you could even include screenshots of the website you want to show. That way, if for some reason the pre-loaded version in your browser doesn’t work, you’ll still have something to show. While you’re at it, if you’ll be displaying any other application while presenting, go ahead and have it loaded too. There’s nothing more frustrating than staring at a splash screen for 30 seconds while you and your audience wait for Photoshop to load.

7. Got an iPhone? Use the Keynote Remote App

Apple’s 99 cent Keynote Remote app will let you use your iPhone or iPod touch to remotely control your presentation. It can advance slides and return to previous slides and can even show you your presenter notes. The only catch is that you must have a Wi-Fi network to use it. If you do not, you can set up a computer-to-computer network with your Mac.

8. Don’t Have an iPhone? Use the Presenter Display for Keynote or PowerPoint

With this mode (accessible under the preferences of each application), you can customize a view to display your current and upcoming slide, show your presenter notes, view a clock and a timer. With Keynote, you’ll need to make sure that your primary display is set to the projector or whatever device you connect to your Mac. Since Keynote uses the “alternate display,” you will need to make this change so that the Presenter Display will show up on your Mac and not your external display.

9. Bring Handouts

So many people overlook this tip, but it’s just about as important as backing up your computer (and we’ve all been guilty of not paying attention to that tip too). If technical difficulties get the best of you, you’ll still have physical copies of your presentation to fall back on. Plus, handouts make a great way to give your audience a leave behind, should you wish to give them out at the end, or they give your audience something to follow along with and add their own notes if you hand them out beforehand.

10. Make A Good Impression

Saving the best for last, a snazzy PowerPoint or Keynote is nothing if the presenter stumbles their way through. Take the time to be familiar with your slides and be able to speak to them with comfort. You don’t have to be the next Steve Jobs, but take your time and be able to present your actual topic.

Do you present with your Mac? Found any great tips that work for you? Give us and your fellow readers your thoughts in the comments below.

Related TechUniversity Screencast: Keynote Transitions & Effects (subscription required)

In this week’s enlightening installment of the App Developer Diary, I pitch my game concept to the coders, preach the gospel of the Game Bible and muse upon the possibility of the project imploding.

Straight after submitting last week’s App Developer Diary, I packed up my MacBook Pro and headed down to Nolla, a local bar and Scandinavian restaurant. I was to meet with Markus, one of the project’s coders, and pitch my game concept to him.

Hailing from Finland, Markus Piipari is one of the three coders who invited me on board to make the game. Together, with his brother Matias and Benjamin Schuster-Böckler, the trio formed Pear Computers, a dev studio specializing in mobile development.

When I arrived at Nolla, Markus was hunched over his MacBook (one of the old white models, which was sealed, I noted, in a scruffy faux-leather hard cover). He glanced up, headphones in ear, and although he acknowledged me with a quick nod, had that glazed look of somebody whose mind is elsewhere.

The pitch process is a fundamental component of having your idea become a reality. It’s the first hurdle, as not only should it be a clear and concise outline of your concept, it should also enthuse the rest of the team. As they say in the industry, you need your team’s buy-in — if the team hasn’t bought in to the concept from the very start, then the project is almost certainly doomed to failure.

I was already nervous enough, pitching a concept that I believed in so firmly, and yet Markus seemed to want to make me sweat more than a chubby man in a Finnish sauna. Perhaps this was a Scandinavian tactic to pile on the pressure and make pitching an even more tense affair? Or maybe Markus was living up to the stereotype of a hardcore programmer: King of the Code, cold and focused.

Setting Up My Pitch

Markus uttered a few words in Finnish, clicked around on his MacBook, and the glazed look dissolved into a warm smile. He wasn’t cold or emotionless, he was just chatting to his brother, Matias, on Skype. And now he was back in the room, ushering me to sit down, already offering me a steaming glass of black coffee — a staple beverage for Finns throughout the year.

Awkwardness over, I booted up my MacBook Pro and opened Apple’s Keynote. Rather than bewilder Markus with the entire game design in one go, I’d prepared a short Steve Jobs-style presentation, explaining the multiplayer component of my game concept. The game was to be a multiplayer bat-and-ball game, featuring novel physics-based power-ups for an added twist.

The images that I’d prepared were mockups of the game screen, featuring arrows and captions pointing to the most important elements — describing the game-flow, control mechanic and graphical style. Markus loved the concept and insisted on immediately contacting Matias and Benjamin to enthusiastically pitch the idea to his team. The coders were on board; I had buy-in. Boom!

The Gospel of Games

With the team bought into the concept, the next step for me would be to produce what’s known as a GDD, a Game Design Document. This document is sometimes referred to as a Game Bible as, once written, it’s the point of reference for every single detail within the game.

Produced during the pre-production phase of a project, the GDD is a key asset during the game’s actual production. It provides guidelines for gameplay, user interface and menu flow, scoring and game rules. It will even include the game’s story, characters and location. Essentially, every detail of the game, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, is mapped out in this document before starting production.

The GDD defines the features and scope of the project; ideally, once production has begun, the GDD won’t change and will serve as a blueprint for the game’s development. Games being what they are — entire populated virtual worlds with their own distinct rules — they are particularly susceptible to feature creep. This project management issue occurs when new features creep in to the product design during the production phase — it drags out development, costing both time and money.

Feeling Doubtful

Over the past few days, since my meeting with Markus, my thoughts have been a flurry of game-related ideas, ready to throw in to the GDD before we begin production. It’s really happening and it’s so exciting to be part of the process. The team — Markus, Matias and Benjamin — are passionate about coding, so accomplished in their abilities, I feel lucky to be working with them.

However, my mind keeps returning to one question: Will this app really make it the App Store? It’s an exciting project indeed, but it’s such a massive undertaking and all the more intense because I’m documenting it in public, right here. It seems like an irrational doubt, but, we could be setting ourselves up for a big fall.

Gomi is a forthcoming iPhone game that blends Katamari Damacy with Mario Galaxy, rolling a recycling blob creature around tiny planets to clean up the trash. Based on the preview videos, the game looks fantastic, yet its release has been delayed for several months now.

My worry is that if one element goes awry (we lose a coder, the game mechanic isn’t fun, the scope is unrealistic, our project planning is off) we could end up delaying, or worse, shutting down the project. Everything seems to have run smoothly so far, but once we get into the nitty gritty of pre-production, I wonder if that will still be the case.

Next time: Marvel at the visual delights as I unveil my conceptual character artwork, delve in to the details of gameplay mechanics and discover what happens when a hardcore coder disagrees with a journalist-cum-designer. It’s all in the next thrilling installment of TheAppleBlog’s App Developer Diary.

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Presenter Pro is a learning resource for professionals and interns alike, coaching you in the ways of effective presenting.

There are three heroes of presenting for me: Merlin Mann, with his deliciously witty and yet precise style; Lawrence Lessig, who takes a high-speed, word-by-word approach; and of course, Steve Jobs, who is alternately expressive, passionate and evangelistic, all of which contributes to his famed reality distortion field.

While Rexi Media might not turn you into a Mann, Lessig or Jobs overnight, the company does specialize in enhancing your presentation skills. It organizes seminars across the U.S., designs bespoke presentation templates, and even has a virtual storefront in Second Life. Its app contains hundreds of tips, alongside an assortment of videos and even quizzes.

Before jumping into the review, it’s worth pointing out that, prior to going freelance as a journalist and creative consultant, one of my specialist areas was presentations — designing them, coaching colleagues, and even delivering them. Over the years, I’ve helped CEOs prepare for presentations, guiding them through the process and helping give their ideas structure. Plus, I’ve presented to some big companies, including 20th Century Fox, Taito, BBC and Marvel Comics.

With my previous experience in presentations, I was particularly keen to see if Rexi Media’s Presenter Pro would really distill all of the necessary strategies for effective presenting into a single iPhone app.

The app itself is split into four different sections: Home, Notes, Video and Checklist. Presenter Pro is, unlike many other e-learning iPhone apps, well-designed. It features large, clearly labeled buttons and is easy to navigate.

Learning At Home

The main hub of the app, Home, breaks down into different subject categories, such as Structure, Visuals and Gestures. Each section contains several paragraphs of text on a given topic; some even include video and audio, which enhances the learning experience.

The Home section guides you through constructing a presentation; from structuring your message to creating visuals all the way to the art of persuasion and projecting your voice. While some beginners may feel overwhelmed by the information overload, it’s important to note that these are all essential areas to cover.

Without proper guidance, though, I worry that certain techniques could go down like a party balloon that’s been dipped in lead, filled with pennies and dropped off the Eiffel Tower. And what’s more, these techniques could potentially be even more damaging to onlookers than the hypothetical effect of my extended simile.

For instance, there’s a section exploring the notion of incongruity — creating conflict or contradiction as a way of grabbing your audience’s attention. It seems like a risky technique, though, especially for beginners. There’s the possibility that it could irritate the audience, or worse, garner a feeling of doubt when you should be gaining the audience’s trust.

Watch And Learn

There are seven videos packaged with the app. It would be great to have more, though — even if it meant compromising on quality — as watching someone deliver information can be an incredibly effective approach for learning.

Each video is around a minute long. They explore salient techniques, such as building anticipation in your audience and using inquiry as a method for garnering interest in a given subject.

The videos don’t feature any instruction or tutorial; they’re simply fictional excerpts from larger presentations, making use of a certain technique. It would have been fun, and certainly more effective, to include a director’s commentary-style voiceover to enhance the learning experience.

It’s good to have these examples, though. However I worry that poor presenters, desperate to become more effective, will literally copy the lines from the video, rather than identifying the essence of the lesson and making use of it.

Summing Up

While there are a couple of questionable pieces of advice — not necessarily awful, just techniques that I wouldn’t advise a beginner makes use of — in general, the lessons are clear, concise and certainly appropriate for individuals looking to boost their presentation skills.

There are some cute extra features, too, like sending text to the Checklist section for future reference. Plus, the presentation tips are an unexpected, but certainly welcome feature, popping up at random intervals.

The iPhone is potentially a great medium for delivering rich learning experiences. While it’s not a replacement for the real thing, e-learning via the iPhone can reinforce real-world experiences. Paired with the opportunity to regularly test out your presentation skills regularly, Presenter Pro would prove to be an invaluable tool.

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For $2.99 (introductory price, in the App Store) you can track your purchases and budget on the go, always knowing what your cash flow situation looks like. Cha-Ching Touch brings extreme usability and a lovely user interface to your finance-tracking tasks, adding the ability to add locations to your payees, to make point-of-sale entry that much simpler. Cha-Ching Touch will also sync with the (currently in beta) desktop version of Cha-Ching 2 (scroll down the page a bit), so your dollars and cents should all add up at the end of the day no matter what device you’re using.

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Welcome To Aqua

The first noticeable item is how quickly OpenOffice 3.0 beta loads, even when compared with Microsoft Office 2008. In less than five seconds you are at the welcome screen ready to create your next masterpiece. Where the X11 interface felt choppy and looked…like an X11 interface, OO 3.0 definitely looks and feels like a fully integrated Aqua application, with menus being very responsive and keyboard shortcuts working (mostly – hey, it’s beta) as expected. How does each behave in this newly integrated world? Let’s take a look.

Writer

Whether it be your latest manuscript, research paper or basic flyer Writer definitely has the tools you need to get the job done. Complex header/footer arrangements, full table of contents manipulation, floating frames and more make this a very sophisticated word & document processor.

I do a great deal of legal document markup and the new notes feature keeps OO 3.0 on track with Pages and Word:

I also especially liked the font preview option for the font menu:

The multi-page layout view mode makes it very easy to see if the visual flow of your document is to your liking:

And, it was refreshing to see a “preview” mode that wasn’t just a export-view to Preview.app:

However, this is also where my first beta bug reared its ugly head with a half-dup of the menubar:

Writer also has basic support for VBA macros, something which neither Pages nor Word 2008 can claim and a feature which came in extremely handy this past weekend for a document I absolutely needed to work with (I could have VMware’d or Boot Camp’d into XP, but OO 3.0 made it so I didn’t have to). That same document also had many form-fields which all worked flawlessly in Writer.

When saving my document, doing so in Microsoft Office compatibility mode produced documents that worked flawlessly on Word 2008 and Word 2003/2007 (on Windows). Importing Microsoft’s new XML-format documents also worked well, though mine aren’t complex by any stretch of the imagination.

Writer is a fine tool, but there are still multi-platform quirks, like the button rendering in some dialogs:

and a less-than Mac-like preferences system:

Calc

I’ll state up-front that I hate spreadsheets. I hate them mostly due to the fact that people use spreadsheet programs as page-layout tools rather then as number crunchers. Numbers understood this and makes no attempt to hide that it is first-and-foremost a way to make pretty, numerical pages. But, getting back to the topic at hand…

Calc is a clear mimic of Excel 2003 for Windows, complete with charting and “solving” capabilities (which the developers are quick to point out do not exist in Excel 2008). Not being a non-work spreadsheet geek (and, I can’t use work examples) I Googled for filetype:xls and pulled a pseudo-random document to work with (the one pictured above). You can see what that Excel document looks like in Excel 2008 just for comparison:

The formatting is pretty much identical and, as a result, I decided to extend my test by checking out Calc’s new charting capabilities:

and then saving in compatibility mode and re-opening in Excel 2008:

I was truly impressed by just how well the two programs worked together, making me a bit more confident if I ever have to use OO 3.0 to edit/share docs with others. I did not have an opportunity to test the new collaboration (i.e. track/merge) feature.

Impress & Draw

With Keynote I have little need for alternate presentation software, but Impress worked as well as previous versions and I did create and preview a quick presentation with no issues:

Similarly, while I have no real need for Draw, it was trivial to create basic line-art documents with this tool:

Database

While it may not have a catchy name like FileMaker (although one could argue that is equally as utilitarian a name) or Bento (I promised myself I would not take this review as an opportunity to trash Bento), OO 3.0′s “Database” application fills a void that exists in Microsoft Office on the Mac and that has been missing in general from the open source world.

The built-in field sets and templates in Database made it trivial to setup a quick recipe database with entry form. And, best of all, I just used the defaults. If I wanted to make it more attractive, I could have spent as much time as necessary crafting primary keys, adjusting field sizes, adding font labels and customizing each feature of the forms. It may be worth it just to keep OpenOffice.org 3.0 around just for the Database program.

The true power of Database comes with full integration into the OO 3.0 suite. I can use the recipe database (if I populate it) to have Writer make a nice recipe file (Database reports could do this as well). Database also allows for data export as well, so you are definitely not locked into the program.

Odds & Ends

Some features spread across the individual components and others were just noteworthy or interesting. For example, when comparing the PDF export feature in Calc, it wound up creating a smaller file than the OS X “print to PDF” option and created table of contents labels based on the spreadsheet tab names.

OO 3.0 also provides a decent number of templates to choose from when starting a new document, some of which aren’t obvious from the flashy “welcome” dialog or just casual interaction with the program (like the full XML document editor).

The help system is very robust and can assist you in pinpointing where to find the functionality you just know is there (like how to mimic Word’s “different first page” feature).

OO 3.0 provides no AppleScript dictionary, so scripters are once again relegated to GUI scripting and the UI – while integrated well with Aqua and with decent Universal Access support – is definitely showing its age. The beta outright crashed on me several times as well, but it confirmed the rock solid document recovery capabilities of the program.

I can say, honestly, that the final version of the software will take its rightful place in my Applications folder, if only to have the ability to deal with the occasional VBA-based document that comes my way and to make use of the Database program.

If you’ve tried OO 3.0 beta or are one of the developers for it, drop a note in the comments with your take on the software and any tips or advice on using the various components. Remember to submit bug reports if you do test the beta and find some quirks. You can also grab a slew of test cases which will cover more of the functionality than I have in this post.

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