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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 …

Following a very successful event in Birmingham a little while back (despite Bruce’s vivid imagination), the people behind Public Sector Forums have recalled the same team to put on another show in London . That team includes Bruce Lawson, Ann McMeekin, Patrick Lauke, Grant Broome, Dan Champion and myself. We’ll be speaking at the Barbican on the 8th of August and would love to see you there.

Don’t be mistaken by the ‘Public Sector’ part of Public Sector Forums – this time around the organisers are opening the event up to anyone – you don’t need to be working in some dingy council office to apply for this one, anyone’s welcome!

I will be doing a general show and tell, finishing up the day’s events with plenty of real world examples of people getting things wrong-diddly-wrong, including many web sites you know and possibly love.

Interested? Find out more on the PSF site and you can book your place here (and please mention ‘Accessify’ in the booking form when asked how you heard about it, even if you did read about it here - thanks!).