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I had all these great ideas about how I was going to approach this. I thought of looking into patents, to see if I could document my idea, protect it and then get someone to build it. But I realised fairly soon that this was a whole can of worms that I did not want to open and I’d never quite get my head around it anyway.

So I then considered the possibility of offering some money to a savvy Mac developer to go ahead and built what I was after, for a fixed price, and I take the gamble on making enough sales and not getting screwed in the process. But I realised soon after that bright idea that software that you sell requires ongoing support, support that I would never realistically be able to provide myself and would be over a barrel for a retainer to the developer. So I’ve decided to just put my big idea down in writing and hope that someone sees value in this and makes it happen. So, here it is:

The Problem

I was presenting the other day and was using Keynote with presenter display on my laptop and the big screen showing the proper slides. I was using my Sony Ericsson phone with a Bluetooth connection to advance the slides. This all seems, on the face of it, to be a good approach. But there were problems:

• When I enable the Bluetooth remote on the Sony Ericsson, it disables/hijacks the mouse trackpad on my MacBook Pro, so I was having to turn it off and back on again when I needed to take control of the laptop
• The setup of the room was such that I could not see the presenter display showing on my laptop screen unless I stayed anchored behind the lectern (something I hate to do), and hence I didn’t have the prompts I wanted/was hoping for
• At certain points during the presentation I needed to take control of multimedia elements on slides (the scrub bar - progress of a movie), but in presenter display mode, these elements are not accessible, so I was having to crane my neck to see what was happening on the main screen to locate the mouse cursor (once I had switched off the Bluetooth, of course) - basically, I could not see the mouse movements in front of me because of the ‘helpful’ presenter display. Bah!

I worked out that there could be a way to solve all these problems with a really slick application for the iPhone. I am going to label it the Keynote Buddy. Here’s how I see it working.

The Solution

• The iPhone has Keynote Buddy installed on it and becomes an extension of Keynote on the Mac.
• The iPhone is used to control the slide advance (and back of course) using touch screen controls.
• The display on the main (projected) screen would be the full screen affair, while the iPhone would give the presenter’s display, similar to the existing Keynote presenter display but because it’s an iPhone it probably should be sexed up with a Coverflow-esque appearance ;-)
• Controls on the Keynote Buddy would allow for changes between presenter display and the audience’s view on the fly so at any time the presenter can see exactly what the audience sees without having to turn around and turn his/her back on the audience
• When embedded multimedia, e.g. a movie, appears on a slide, the presenter should get a nice fat thumb-friendly overlay on the iPhone screen so that he/she can pause and restart the movie, while the audience sees just that the movie has paused, with no distracting overlay
• The Keynote Buddy software will, by default, automatically disable the phone from ringing/vibrating during presentation mode - no embarrassing moments
• Finally, and this is a nice to have, for moments when the presenter needs to exit the slides for a live demo, the iPhone should allow the presenter access to the host Mac’s desktop so that with a few double-clicks, he/she can navigate around to a demo file.

Something like this, in fact:

So that’s what I want. What about you? Are you a seasoned presenter with Keynote? Got an iPhone? Long for something that ties the two together in the way I’ve described? Please, tell someone who can make it happen. And if they do make it hapen, and if they want to thank me for suggesting the idea, I’d be happy to take a shiny new iPhone as a form of payment. As long as it’s got a copy of Keynote Buddy installed. Because I’ve got this need, you see, and it’s for a modern-day presentation prompt card thing …

And before I get flamed for that, I’m making a direct reference to one of Apple’s memorable announcements in days past, namely the time that iTunes was announced for Windows users. Mac fans around the world grumbled that their nice little music library application was being shared amongst the great unwashed but soon got over it. "They can have our iTunes, but they’ll never have our wonderful iLife apps or super-fast Safari".

Well, looks like we need to have another re-think.

So, one of the announcements at yesterdays WWDC conference in San Francisco was that Safari was going to be available for Windows users after all. The press release boasted that is is the "fastest browser running on Windows, based on the industry standard iBench tests, rendering web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2". How reliable those claims are may be tested over the coming days.

But what does this mean to the world of web standards? The browser wars were played out a long time ago - does this mean that the ceasefire has been broken? Is it a new front being opened up or is it simply a minor skirmish that the rest of the world can turn a blind eye to?

I don’t have the answers - I was surprised as many people, blindly assuming that Safari would always and ever be a Mac-only piece of software - and I can’t claim to be massively excited about the prospect of using Safari on Windows. Or at least not until such a time as Firefox extensions, such as the indespensible Web Developer Toolbar, can be made to work in Safari but that’s like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. But that said, I think it’s a good thing:

• No more will testing for Safari be left until the last moment (or at all) - finally developers can check their work early on
• If it really is faster to render pages, that can only be good for the user
• Mac users will benefit too, as it will become more difficult to reject support problems on Safari with a simple "Ah but that’s just a certain percentage (Safari users) of an already small percantage of users (Mac users)"

So, what’s your take on this announcement? Exciting? Will it change the browsing landscape massively? Or are you just thinking "meh, whatever".

So, this new iPhone thing. It’s gonna be great isn’t it? It’ll be like the *new* white headphones - that screamingly obvious sign that says you are in ownership of some high value gadgetry. The oh-so-lovely (virtual) buttons seem to scream ‘Mug me!’ in their own delightfully lickable, tastefully designed finish. Only this time the muggers get your phone, your camera, your music, your emails and your photos. Let’s hope that no-one invents a system that lets your iPhone wirelessly start your car, too!

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, macworld, touchscreen

…. fastest to go to the repair shop, that is?

Yesterday I took delivery of a brand new MacBook Pro - it has the uprated 7200 rpm drive, but it’s not the brand spanking duo core model. It was, after all, an eBay purchase.

The box was sealed so I revelled in unwrapping it (although I didn’t take photos of each and every stage as some do - been there, done that, just get me to the machinerey ASAP, I say!). I then set it to migrate from my iBook and left it for a while. Once it had done its thing, I fired it up and realised that I’d migrated from the wrong partition (I’d moved across my music/DJ only partition. Oops!). So, I popped in the OS X 10.4.whatever install disk with the aim of wiping and starting again.

The CD went in a little ‘heavily’ then made a bit of a strange noise as it span. a noise that got louder as it span even more, almost shaking the machine with its ferocity. It felt like there was a cutting disk inside there (like you get on a grinder) judging by the noise, and was working about as well as a cutting disk might inside a MacBook Pro. After many fruitless minutes of it spinning but not mounting the disk, I switched it off and tried to eject the disk at bootup. Then the machine failed to boot *or* eject the disk. Nice.

Moments later I was on the phone to Apple to register the product and then immediately get it in for repair.

For a few fleeting moments, yesterday, I had a MacBook Pro but now it’s in the sick bay - I don’t even have a photo of it. It’s almost as if it never existed!

Interesting … I was considering whether to treat myself to another laptop, and the MacBook Pro was looking very tempting, but also just a little on the expensive side. Today’s announcements about the MacBooks got me all excited again and so I started putting together some prospective purchase scenarios. I have to say, the new black MacBook looks very sexy … but at what price?

I discounted the ‘beginner’ MacBook (which won’t burn DVDs, no good for me) immediately and tried a couple of different configs with the other MacBooks on offer - both have 2Ghz processors, but there is a difference in the hard drive size. The white MacBook has the smaller drive at 60GB, while the shiny, oh-so-sexy black one sports a 80GB drive. And that, it seems, is all the difference (aside from the colour). But here’s the weird thing - when I uprated the memory on both machines and maxed the hard drive size on the white MacBook to 120GB, while bumping the black one up to 100GB, the white MacBook still came in cheaper. Compare (results from UK store taken on 16 May):

The higher spec machine is now the white one - now with a whole 20GB bigger hard drive - and is still £10 cheaper than the black MacBook!

So, what would you do - pay for the privilege of getting a black MacBook, or go for a higher spec … and the likelihood that you’ll maybe mistake your new MacBook for your old iBook G4 on more than one occasion :-p