Last autumn, some friends of ours gave a public presentation of one of their projects using Apple's Keynote. For whatever reason, they couldn't find how to see their on-screen presentation notes. They wound up using a second laptop in Keynote's edit mode just to see their notes, while the first one ran the presentation. Recently, my own version of Powerpoint had decided to by unruly and collapse every few minutes, so out of necessity, I converted to Keynote. Thankfully, Keynote exports effortlessly to Powerpoint, which is what I primarily do to send files to clients, but eventually came the day when I used it for a presentation and had no problems finding how to display my presentation notes to my laptop screen while the external projector/monitor hid them. I suspect for our friends, it was in a moment of panic or lack of familiarity or preparedness that they couldn't discern this functionality (it certainly wasn't obvious). Yet, watching Steve Jobs' latest Keynote address, I did wonder, how Apple produces these marvelous demonstrations that Jobs conducts with such aplomb? He's obviously using a remote device to prompt changes in the Nuremburg-scaled screen, thus not having a laptop to work from, how does he see any notes? Surely, he hasn't committed his routine to memory like some Roman Senator, has he? Of course not. He slyly uses a small, ultra-thin, infinitely powered, super-tech gadget called, "Notepad". From the picture below, you can see this amazing new device in action. Incroyable! Formibable! Or maybe Mr. Jobs just hasn't figured out how to see his presentation notes in Keynote yet.



PS. Ultimate geek alert. He could just use a Bluetooth enabled phone to run the presentation AND see his notes, but that might be asking a bit much.

Labels: media, technology