Presentation Assistant – Disc of the Month May 2009

29 March, 2009 by Nicholas Pyers

Blogs

Presentation Assistant – A collection of applications and resources to help get the most out of your Keynote Presentations. These have been broken up in to three categories; one for applications and resources to help you design and create your presentation; the next contains applications for use during the actual presentation itself and finally a selection for creating material used after or at the conclusion of your presentation.

Pre-Production

Attendees Alerter: Periodically checks iCal calendars, searching for appointments with guests. Sends to each guest an email reminder,within a few days of the appointment date. Shareware

Art Text: Create high quality textual graphics, headings, logos, icons, web site elements and buttons. Thanks to multi layer support creating complex graphics is no sweat. Shareware

Clips: Your Mac OS X clipboard reinvented: manage snippets, expand text on-the-fly and share clippings like never before! Use Clips to increase productivity during your daily computing experience. Shareware

Desktopple Pro: Quickly and easly hides all of your Desktop clutter ready for a taking screenshot or before your presentation. Shareware

Fontcase: Designed to be an iTunes for your fonts, Fontcase has a powerful tagging system, which is designed to let you control your fonts like you control your music. Shareware

Grammarian PRO X: An arsenal of professional writing tools to combat those embarrassing writing errors that everyone tends to make, a universal interactive grammar checking, smart spelling checking, dictionary, thesaurus, autocorrect, and styled-text autotype tool. Demo

Keynote Jam: 56 high-quality, 3D-rendered images specifically designed for Keynote. Freeware

Keynote Objects: 50 Keynote Objects FX including sand, glass, spheres, microscopes, and even pins. All images are included so a designer can find the perfect objects for their presentation. Freeware

OmniDazzle: A set of fun and useful enhancements that help you highlight certain areas of your screen, create visual effects, and track the location of your mouse pointer. Freeware

Rainbow Text: Allows you to apply colorful gradients to text. Freeware

ScreenRecord Studio: The all-in-one screen capture production suite that includes everything you need to create your presentation. Import video clips, images & audio to create clear and powerful presentations. Shareware

Screen Steps: Takes the drudgery out of creating visual, step-by-step software tutorials/guides. With ScreenSteps you can communicate software instructions clearly and quickly. Shareware

Screenium: Quickly make live videos of your Mac’s screen capture everything that’s happening there, including mouse pointer, selections and movements in real-time! Shareware

Snapz Pro X: Snapz Pro X allows you to effortlessly record anything on your screen, saving it as a QuickTime movie or screenshot. Shareware

TextExpander: Listens to what you type and inserts user-defined snippets on the fly whenever you enter their corresponding abbreviations. Correct your most common typos automatically. Shareware

TextSoap: The premier text transformation tool designed to make you more productive with all your text. Take control of your text and its style. Shareware

TypeBook Creator: Allows you to create and print professional type specimen or font sample books of your entire font collection. Demo

Vvidget: Point-and-click graphing solution. Freeware

Presentation Aides

MacTimer: Makes it easy to run multiple timers on your Macintosh. Freeware

Mira: Take personal control for any application, on any Mac, using the Apple Remote Control (additional hardware required on some systems). Shareware

Mousepose: Dims the screen and puts a spotlight on the area around the mouse pointer, easily guiding the audiences attention to an area of interest. Demo

On Air Recorder: A highly visual digital timer application that also provides the ability to control audio and video recording through its start and stop buttons. It can be used as a standalone big digital timer, or simultaneously control the audio/video recording features. Demo

Pointer+: A simple application that enlarges the section of your screen currently under the mouse. Demo

Poster Print: Create a poster with only a few clicks and you can extend your poster using other elements such as text and images. Trial

Present Your Apps: Lets you easily remove or hide the Dock and menu bar when launching selected applications. Donationware

ProfCast: Versatile tool for recording lectures and creating enhanced podcasts using an integrated workflow that makes creating, recording, and publishing podcasts easy. Demo

Remote Buddy: Allows you to remotely control anything on your Mac with your iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple Remote or Wii Remote. Includes a virtual on screen keyboard and mouse and virtual remote control emulating an Apple Remote. Demo

Salling Clicker: Turns a compatible mobile phone or PDA into an advanced wireless two-way remote control for your Mac. Shareware

Sofa Control: With Sofa Control you are able to control your applications with the Apple Remote Control using a spezialized Front Row inspired user interface enables the user to access application specific menus or select movies and documents. Demo

Stage Clock: With one Mac running Live Clock at your live event you can control informational monitors for all your production team and stage performers to know when and what they are supposed to do something. Demo

Zooom/2: Provides you the ability to work with any application window using keyboard shortcuts and the mouse to move, resize, snap and zoom your windows incredibly quickly. Shareware

Post Production

Business Card Composer: A tool to create and print business cards, calling cards and badges. Shareware

Cheap Impostor: Takes any PDF (say your Keynote Notes) and turns it into a booklet that can simply be folded and stapled. Shareware

Watermarks: Tool for creating watermark-imprinted PDF files. And for extra security, you can use Watermarks to rasterize your PDF document, eliminating the editable text completely. Demo

Bonuses

The CD of Presentation Assistant has dozens of free Keynote templates to get you started with your presentation, and here in the Australian Macworld blog we have some bonus links to various iPhone & iPod touch applications that can help during your presentation.

AirMote: Use your iPhone or iPod touch as a remote control for Front Row, DVD Player, VLC, Keynote, PowerPoint and just about anything else on your Mac. Paid App

Air Mouse Pro: Transforms your iPhone into an in air, wireless remote for your computer. Paid App

iTalk Recorder Premium: Way more than a ‘Voice Recorder’ Your recordings are saved for replay on your iPhone or iPod and you can copy them to your computer over Wi-Fi as high-quality AIFFs. Paid App

Keynote Remote: Control your Keynote presentation on your Mac from your iPhone or iPod touch. Swipe to advance or return to the previous slide. In portrait mode, see your presenter notes on your iPhone and in Landscape mode, preview your next slide. Paid App

Stage Hand: Control your Keynote ’08 presentations. Features include; Spotlight your slide; Jump directly to any slide during a presentation; Black/whiteout screen; Presentation Timer; Adjustable font size in Notes View; Control your Mac’s Volume and lots, lots more. Paid App

Remote: Control iTunes or an Apple TV from your iPhone or iPod touch over WiFi. Free App

Rowmote: Just like the Apple Remote Control, but over WiFi. Plus by tapping the Apps button, you get bonus abilities, switching between controlled programs and toggling the iTunes Visualizer. Paid App

Availability

Presentation Assistant is available on CD for $10 from participating Apple User Groups, including;

Many User Groups allow you to purchase the Discs of the Month from their meetings – often at a discount; or to order via the web, postal mail, fax or telephone.

Macworld Australia