Review: Targus Bluetooth Presentation Remote
If you're like me, you probably subscribe to either MacWorld Magazine or Mac Life. Over the past several months, I've seen the ads for the Targus AMP11US Bluetooth Presenter for Mac
Would the remote survive a nuclear holocaust like the Twinkie?
With my curiosity and need for a better remote in hand, I ordered the remote. Given the small size of the Keyspan remote, I figured that it too would be quite thin. Instead, it is fairly deep and when I first caught glimpse of its profile, it immediately reminded me of a Twinkie. That might be a bit of a stretch, but my mind works in mysterious ways sometimes.
With the initial visual impression aside, I did notice that it has a very different feel compared to other remotes I've used, including the Logitech device I was offered once at work. The physical dimensions seem to put this in between the Keyspan and Logitech devices while the Targus remote has much more heft. This extra weight can be attributed to AA batteries. If this gives me longer battery life than my Keyspan remote, then I'm happy. The Keyspan's battery is so obscure, the only local store that carries it is Radio Shack. Then again, what don't they have? It fits my hand perfectly, but if you have a smaller hand, then you might find it bulky.
Since I have a big presentation this week, I spent the past Friday working from home rehearsing over and over. I also took the opportunity to put the Targus remote through its paces.
Setup was simple. Turn on Bluetooth up in the Mac menubar if it isn't already on and choose "Set up Bluetooth Device." Follow the prompts and you're good to go.
I fired-up Keynote, hit the "slide show" button on the remote and got going. I eventually got to a slide with a in-slide build and hit the next button. It promptly took me to the next slide.
Rut-roh.
Apparently, the "Next Slide" button really means just that. Next slide. The only way to get the behavior I need is to switch it over to "mouse mode" and use the left button, which is what's used for "previous slide" in presenter mode. This is a serious flaw that I really hope Targus fixes.
There were a few occasions when the computer would lose its connection with the remote. Whether this was a problem of my MacBook Pro (unibody 15") or the remote, I can't say. I moved 20-25 feet away as I practiced my presentation and was still able to advance my slides, so distance wasn't an issue. If anyone has any insight into what's going on there, I'd love to hear from you.
Over all, my experience with this remote was a mixed bag. Even with the issues I encountered, I did have more confidence in this remote over the Keyspan remote for one reason: I could reasonably trust that when I pressed the button, Keynote would respond. With the wheel on the Keyspan remote, I didn't have that assurance. I did learn later when showing my wife how to use it that the Play/Pause button on the Keyspan remote can also control the slides, but their positioning is too far down the remote. What's worse is "Play" is "back" and "Pause" is "forward."
Pros:
- Good feel
- Good range
- No USB dongle
- "Slideshow button"
- "Blank Screen" button
Cons:
- "Next slide" button skips build steps
- Occasionally lost connection
Snow Leopard Really IS That Big Of A Deal
I'm going to take a break from writing about slide design and slideware for a moment to tackle another subject: Snow Leopard. As you're probably aware, Apple's newest OS, Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) was released barely more than a week ago. Pundits all around have been quick to criticize the OS release, citing reasons for their criticism such as "it's not really 64-bit," "I don't see anything different (features)," "some software is breaking," and as Leo Laporte recently said in last week's TWiT and MacBreak Weekly podcasts, "it feels like just a service pack," and "was it worth it for all that broke?" Over and over, the theme was Snow Leopard is to Leopard what Windows 7 is to Windows Vista.
In short, those are very short-sighted comments that miss the point. Whereas Microsoft loudly proclaims they bet the company on .Net (It's a fool's bet actually. Enterprise shops won't not choose Microsoft. Enterprise IT shops are run by MCSEs who wrongly see anything non-Microsoft as a threat to their job security and managed by suits too afraid to buck the status quo), Apple quietly bet the company on Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard isn't a minor operating system release. I wouldn't even qualify it as a major release. It's a strategic release. Here's why:
- 64-bit
- Apple's switch to Intel
- Carbon and Cocoa
- OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch
- Quicktime X
- What's next
64-bit
One of the loudest complaints, especially among the professional Apple-haters (the aforementioned Microsoft-certified IT workers) and tech commentators have been trying to hammer Apple on this issue for the past few weeks. The more they do this, the more they show themselves to be either shills, angling for page views, or just plain old missing the boat. Leo Laporte is a prime example of the latter. In his enviable quest to be the anti-shill through professional objectivity, he missed what isn't being said: The move to 64-bit is progressive and deliberate. Take, for example, this graphic from an excellent piece by John Siracusa of Ars Technica:
Credit: Ars Technica
The Enterprise IT pundits have been especially brutal when it comes to the roll-out of 64-bit by Apple. To understand why, we need to look at the world they live in.
Their world is Microsoft Windows. The Operating System that comes in so many flavors, it could even make Baskin Robins nervous (am I showing my age here?). Windows Vista is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, each sold separately. Windows 7 will be sold the same way. Those who install the 64-bit version of Windows unwittingly (consumers like my in-laws) run into a host of issues such as application incompatibilities and driver issues. Apple, as we know, sells one desktop OS version. Since they won't and shouldn't fragment their OS offerings the way Microsoft has, Apple needs to be very deliberate in the way it moves to 64-bit. Go all the way at once, and Apple will find itself with their own Vista: an OS nobody in their right mind would want and be caught trying to cope with the vast majority of their user base refusing to upgrade.
Apple's Switch to Intel
True, Snow Leopard does have a 64-bit kernel, but it doesn't boot into that kernel by default. That's kind of the point. You don't keep your customers happy and loyal by cutting their legs out from under them. Now, granted, some did have that happen to them, but unless you're entrenched in "the Windows way," there's no way you didn't see that coming. By "the Windows way," I mean slavish devotion to backwards compatibility, no matter how old the technology is.
I'll use my father in-law as an example of this backwards-compatible mess. He has a Windows laptop and likes to connect his Meade telescope to his computer so he can find the stars, galaxies, and whatever he's looking for and download the pictures to his hard drive. He also has a scanner (CB), that he can program from his laptop. His problems with Vista are quite evident in his troubles with the telescope. The drivers are Windows 98 drivers that Meade doesn't think need to be updated. Backwards compatibility was just assumed by Meade and they didn't seem to think it all that important to update them. Now his scanner issue is particularly amusing (unless you're him). It uses the old-fashioned serial port to connect to computers. The software looks for COM ports. I kid you not. He bought this just last year. The fact that some computers still have these outdated technologies (floppy disks, anyone?), encourages this resistance to drop dead technologies.
It's this kind of situation that Apple is avoiding by dropping (killing) technologies before they become a burden. When Apple killed the floppy drive on Macs, they sent a strong message to software developers: don't release your software on floppies anymore if you want to sell any software to our customers. Likewise with those legacy serial and parallel ports: don't sell printer with parallel ports instead of USB if you want to sell your wares to our customers. Microsoft, on the other hand, trying to protect its OEMs (Dell, HP, etc.), won't make those tough choices. That slavish devotion to backwards compatibility is in large part why Windows is so bloated. Apple, by declaring PowerPC the new floppy disk, was able to trim the size of its operating system and make it faster than its predecessor, a feat unheard-of in Windows.
It's been three and a half years since Apple started selling Intel-based Macs. The normal lifecycle of a computer should bear this point clearly: "It's time to get with the program. We're moving on. Time to come with us."
Carbon and Cocoa
With each OS upgrade, Apple brought its consumers along to 64-bit land gradually, giving all of us time to adjust, peripheral lifecylces a chance to run their course, flushing out the old junk, and software and hardware vendors a chance to get on board. Before Leopard came out, Apple warned that its Carbon Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) were made available so that developers could make the transition from OS 9 to OS X smoothly.
For those of you who may not be technical, the Carbon an Cocoa APIs are merely instructions programmers can use within Objective C (Apple's programming language) to perform routine tasks and avoid reinventing the wheel. Carbon was designed to allow for easy migration of application code written for OS 9 to work in OS X, which is a vastly different operating system. Cocoa is the code name for Apple's APIs that are designed to be free of this legacy baggage.
An example of a company that didn't see the writing on the wall the moment Carbon and Cocoa were each made available and ignored Apple's warning prior to the release of Leopard (10.5) was Adobe. Much was made of the fact that Photoshop CS4 for Windows was available in 64-bit while the Mac version was still 32-bit. Blame went back and forth, but in the end, Adobe should have asked themselves some simple questions:
- Apple has two APIs available. Why?
- Given (1), should we expect Apple to keep two around with equal capabilities?
- Which API will have legs?
- Given (1), (2), and (3), which should we choose for a product as important as Photoshop?
Microsoft got the message and released Office 2008 as a Cocoa app. Many others did the same, which is why many of the Mac apps out there now work only on Leopard (and by extension, Snow Leopard). Granted, many of the apps are Leopard-only because they leveraged Leopard-specific technologies, but those that were 64-bit had to be written in 64-bit Cocoa, which was made available in Leopard. 64-bit Carbon didn't, doesn't, and won't exist.
Like the switch to Intel, this is a transition that will likely culminate in 10.7 being fully 64-bit without any support for Carbon. The reason is a good one, too. OS X was released in 2001. That was eight years ago. If you are still clinging onto that OS 9 legacy code, then your application is a dinosaur, much like that scanner with the serial port.
OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch
Apple, in reworking the plumbing of OS X made some pretty important and dramatic changes to Objective C itself that they are submitting to the standards bodies responsible for the C language(s). I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty with those changes, but basically, Apple is making it easier for developers to write better code and get the most out of our hardware, which gets us to OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch.
OpenCL is an complimentary technology of OpenGL, the open standard for 3D graphics used by OS X, Linux, and game consoles such as the Sony PSP, PS3, and Nintendo's Wii. What OpenGL does for graphics, OpenCL does for computing. Most of us have computers with pretty powerful graphics cards installed. When we're not playing games, chances are, our video cards are barely breaking a sweat, if they're doing much of anything at all. OpenCL taps into this "computer within a computer" to allow your computer to do more at once. Applications that make effective use of OpenCL will be much faster than those that don't.
Grand Central Dispatch is a technology that will allow all developers, not just the "code ninjas," to write applications that make use of all of the cores in our computers' CPUs. If you're using a modern Mac with an Intel Core2 Duo, you've got two CPU cores at your disposal. If you've got a Mac Pro (jealous), then you likely have even more; up to eight. Most applications we have on our computer don't make use of the two cores. They'll run on one core at a time, but not both. For applications such as Office, which can be a CPU hog for no good reason, this can give you the dreaded spinning beach ball as the CPU processes all of the application's threads. This happens while the second core is sitting there idle. With Grand Central Dispatch and the changes to Objective C that make this new OS X technology more readily adoptable, applications can finally make use of that idle core and get your work done much faster.
OS X: Now with less beach ball. Who says that's not a big deal?
Quicktime X
Another technology in OS X that is shedding some legacy baggage is Quicktime. With Quicktime X, Apple is shedding the baggage in Quicktime 7 that dates back to the 90s. If Apple wants to make OS X perform better, it's time to let the old junk go. Now, just as with the transition to 64-bit, consumers aren't left in the lurch. The Quicktime X player will call upon 7 as needed if you're trying to watch a video with some old codecs.
Some video professionals are bemoaning the loss of functionality found in Quicktime Pro (still available by manually installing the old version in Snow Leopard). What some of these pundits miss is the parallel with what Apple did with iMovie. In iLife '08, Apple completely rewrote iMovie from the ground up. There was a huge uproar about lost functionality (and some snickering from Windows users I work with), but those concerns were laid to rest a year later with iMovie '09. In that version, Apple put the missing functionality and then a lot more into the application. The rewrite was necessary to get iMovie to the level that we see it in the '09 version. Likewise, I see Quicktime X as analogous to iMovie '08. Complain now, but the next version will knock your socks off.
What's Next
All of what I have shared thus far brings us to this point. The pundits who dismiss all of these major, no, wait, strategic changes to OS X are not looking to the future. Some are looking to the future, but too far out. Each year (mostly), we see iLife updates in the MacWorld Expo time frame; January to be exact. Do you see where I'm going here now? OpenCL. GrandCentral Dispatch. Quicktime X. 64-bit. This all point to a major upgrade and performance boost for iLife in the as yet unmentioned '10 release. Those who keep saying they see no reason to upgrade now will finally get it when the next iLife comes out. Apple's pro apps (Final Cut Studio, Aperture, etc.) will also likely see major updates, though Final Cut Studio needs to join the Cocoa world (ironic, isn't it?).
The next OS, 10.7, which may not come out for another couple years will probably be fully 64-bit, killing off Carbon in the process. Pundits such as Andy Ihnatko, who herald 10.6 as the slowing of major feature releases for OS X will probably find themselves backing off those statements since Snow Leopard is the foundation for the amazing functionality and features to come.
While Microsoft is cleaning up their UI and some of the inefficient code underneath for Windows 7, Apple is doing more than just fixing long-standing bugs or annoyances from Leopard. This is a strategic upgrade of their OS that positions it in such a way that makes the OS immediately faster and leaner and in the short and medium term, we'll see applications start to come out taking advantage of the new technologies. When you consider all of the new Mac OS developers the iPhone has given us, this time next year, the punditry should be exclaiming the sucker punch to the Windows platform delivered by Apple's bet-the-company OS: Snow Leopard.
Slideware Shoot-Out: Keynote ’09, PowerPoint 2008, & OpenOffice 3 Impress
It was with great joy that last month, I uninstalled Office 2004. The software, PowerPoint 2004 included, were getting on my nerves and there was nothing that suite could do to repair the broken relationship we had. It wore out its welcome.
Since then, I signed up to teach a slide design class through the county's adult & community education program. Having only Keynote on my laptop wasn't going to cut it, so I bought a copy of Office 2008 and downloaded OpenOffice 3.0 for it's slideware "app," Impress. Not only was I prepared to address software-specific questions, but I was also given a grand opportunity: a three-way slideware shoot-out.
In this side-by-side-by-side comparison, I won't be taking the same approach other sites such as MacWorld and their like take. Rather than giving points to the tools that have the most of whatever garbage they may offer, I'll focus more on what is important and not count the fluff or garbage. I'm breaking this comparison down to five different categories:
- Templates
- Interface
- Design Tools
- Charting
- Presenter Tools
I'm also scoring them and will provide each category's scores (out of 20) throughout the article.
Templates
When it comes to templates, what I'm looking for is quality, not quantity. PowerPoint 2004 had quantity all wrapped up. However, it lacked quality templates. What's important is that there are professional-quality templates as well as easy to access options for simple, unobtrusive designs.
Keynote has a great theme chooser that you're presented with when you launch the app. They range from the simple to the business-oriented to the family-friendly. The first four (White, Black, Gradient, and Showroom) are the ones I lean on most heavily as they're simple yet well thought-out. The theme chooser allows you to preview the slides in the themes by moving your mouse over the thumbnails. Creating themes on your own is also brain-dead simple. Of the three, Keynote's theme creation process was the simplest. Since the slide layouts in each theme are not set in stone, there are endless creative ways to design your themes. Even the built-in themes' layouts are all different. If you import slides from another deck, using a different theme, that theme and its associated layouts are available to your deck. I find this useful in limited situations.
PowerPoint's template choices in the 2008 version are light-years ahead of those in PowerPoint 2004. The templates are well designed and thought out. For a moment, I had to do a double-take to make sure this was PowerPoint. There is also a great option, in the palette, to create attractive gradient backgrounds. Creating templates is no different than it has been in previous versions of the application and PowerPoint has a set, defined collection of slide layouts, which are neither complete nor are they imaginative. Like Keynote, you can access more than one template by importing another deck's slides.
The quality of OpenOffice Impress's template choices should be quite familiar to those who have used Office 2004 or Office 2003 and earlier on Windows. They're bad. Very bad. What's worse, when a template got applied to my deck, I couldn't shake it. No matter what I did, I could not get it to switch to a plain white template like that I used in Keynote and PowerPoint. Impress was just as rigid in layout options as PowerPoint and seemingly lacked the ability to use different templates in the same deck.
Scores:
Keynote: 20, PowerPoint 2008: 17, OpenOffice: 5
Interface
This section is pretty subjective, and everyone will probably have different opinions here, especially with Office 2008's ribbon interface. The one complaint that I have with each is that they in one way or another thumb their nose at the long-established Mac's human interface conventions and the metaphors that support them.
Keynote '09's interface isn't all that different than '08, with the exception of a few new toolbar buttons. The fact that they're attached to the document still, in my opinion, fails to make sense. However, with that said, the icons are not crowded and the functionality is quite obvious. The inspector palettes are well thought-out, which is good, because this is where you'll spend most of your time when working with objects.
PowerPoint's ribbon interface is not for everyone. Windows users who have migrated to Office 2007 can tell you that as well. It attempts to bring everything to the front and it does that, though surprisingly not without still requiring a lot of (unnecessary in my opinion) clicks to do what you want to do. The very nature of moving everything forward also has an expted result: a dramatic loss of screen real estate. PowerPoint still has a palettes, but you'll find your time bouncing back and forth between the ribbon and the palette pretty equally. If everything in the palette were in the ribbon, that space up top would be just far too crowded.
OpenOffice's interface will probably be the most familiar to those using PowerPoint 2003 or earlier. It seems the developers didn't try to build different and better slideware application, but rather to mimic PowerPoint as much as they could. The same menu and function names are used and the interface looks a lot like a PowerPoint 2003 knock-off. As a Mac user, this type of interface is not what I would expect or want. It shows either a lack of understanding or caring on Sun's part.
Scores:
Keynote: 17, PowerPoint 2008: 12, OpenOffice: 4
Design Tools
This is where we get our hands dirty. In this section, I'm taking a look at some basic tools presenters would need for engaging visuals.
Keynote '09 had one improvement over its predecessor that really shines here: guides and rulers. If there's a reason to love Keynote it's this. You can have as many guides as you want in Keynote, all of which help snap your text and objects into place. When placing objects, even when you don't have guides on your screen, Keynote helps you space objects evenly. The ruler is logical (x-axis is 10 "inches") as well.
If there's an Achille's heel in Keynote, it's shapes. Keynote's shapes options is abysmal. It has the basics and that's it. If Apple wants to make Keynote more attractive to the business community (do they?), they need to beef up this part of the application.
Adding video and other media, on the other hand is another area where Keynote shines. In addition to importing media from your file system, you can add media directly from iTunes, iPhoto, and GarageBand. Cropping images and using masks is incredibly simple and effective. Cropping makes sense in Keynote. Videos playing on the screen give you on-screen controls when you move the mouse, which gives you an incredible amount of control when it matters. There are a healthy amount of options when placing images with some basic options such as shadows, reflections and what's called "Instant Alpha." This allows you to specify a color to make transparent, making it simple to get rid of pesky backgrounds in your images.
Build and transition options are quite healthy in Keynote, the newest of which is "Magic Move." If you have spent any time learning Flash, you'll recognize this as essentially "tweening." With Magic Move, you can have a transition between slides where an objec that exists on both slides can move, making it seem not so much as though you're moving to a new slide, but rather as though it's an on-slide build.
PowerPoint 2008 stumbles, in my opinion, where it stumbled in 2004: guides. I was completely unable to add any more than two guides (one horizontal, one vertical). Mapping out the power points (rule of thirds) was impossible except by one point at a time.
While PowerPoint stumbles on guides, it absolutely shines when it comes to its built-in library of shapes and collections of shapes. Though many of the collections are of the overused and improperly used types I see often, at least they're there for those who need them.
Importing media to your slides hasn't changed much since 2004 with no apparent effort by Microsoft to integrate with the iLife apps. This is quite unfortunate. Cropping images is fairly confusing and can be quite complicated getting the crop you want. Though the same effect can be obtained as with Keynote, it takes far more work and time to do so. This process is not intuitive. The video I added did not include the controls when I rand the slide show, even when I selected that option. The option to play the video in full screen mode was welcome. In addition, the video was not included in the file. This keeps the file size down, but it needs to be something you're aware of if you try to share the slide deck. To share the file, be sure to save it as a "PowerPoint Package," however, when I did this, it created a folder that contained just the .pptx file, but no movie. Also note that if you change the file name of your movie, PowerPoint will be unable to find it and play it.
As with Keynote, PowerPoint's collection of transitions (which should be used sparingly and purposefully) are pretty deep and easy to access. There is one exception: no Magic Move equivalent.
Impress, in its effort to emulate Office 2003, really shows how bad it can be as a slide design tool. Like PowerPoint, it falls flat on its face with the guides and rulers. However, in an attempt to outshine PowerPoint as a failure in this area, the ruler is 11 inches long along the x-axis. Now, this surely appears to faithfully represent an 8.5 x 11 inch document, but it makes using the guides to help with the rule of thirds an unnecessary hassle.
OpenOffice has a very good collection of shapes. Larger than Keynote's but nowhere near PowerPoint's offerings. With Impress, you can even turn your two-dimensional objects into three-dimensional shapes that you can rotate. This was pretty impressive.
Media handling was quite difficult. Cropping was just as bad as PowerPoint in what seems to be yet another case of copying Microsoft rather than trying to come up with a better way. Adding a video was as easy as PowerPoint, but lacked the options that either Keynote or PowerPoint offered. Like PowerPoint, the video is not included in the file, so changing the file name or moving the file will confuse the application.
Scores:
Keynote: 16, PowerPoint 2008: 15, OpenOffice: 8
Charting
I looked at each application's charting abilities by looking at the default design it gives you, using a bar chart and pie chart and then I try to eliminate the chart junk and evaluate how each gets you there, if it can.
Keynote's charts are, no doubt, attractive. They give you a lot to avoid (crazy textures), but when staying two dimensional, as you should, you get decent charts right out of the box. Moving to the next step is where Keynote shines as I was able to create attractive and easy to read charts with minimal effort.
PowerPoint's edges out Keynote, in my opinion, with the default charts. This is an area that Microsoft put a lot of effort into and it shows. When you ignore all the 3D chart offerings (3D charts lie), you get some half-decent charts. Where it fell flat for me was the attempt to get to a low chart-junk chart. If you look at the final documents, you can see I couldn't get there fully with the bar chart. The pie chart could only be exploded one slice at a time, which only makes it more difficult to make it look well proportioned. At least Keynote gives you a more universal explosion as well as the ability to slide the slices out one at a time.
With charts, OpenOffice shows what can happen when you put your effort into emulating the previous version of Office. The charts were abysmal out of the box and the process of reducing chart junk was painful. There was a nice feature where you can move bars to the left or right without editing the data table. However, all of the detailed customizability made the editing process very time intensive as there was no global option that seemed to work.
Scores:
Keynote: 14, PowerPoint 2008: 14, OpenOffice: 6
Presenter Tools
In this last section, I cover not just those features you use when it's showtime, but also those that are helpful when practicing your presentation or even sharing your deck.
All three allow you skip slides in your deck. By doing this, you can use the same large deck for all of your presentations, while triming it in a nondestructive manner as needed for each presentation. PowerPoint and OpenOffice do this by putting the slide number (in the sorter view) in a box with a line through it, not a very visible indicator. PowerPoint takes this one step further by fading out the slide in the slide sorter. Keynote makes the skip more obvious and easy to implement. The skipped slides are flattened and can be skipped and unskipped by right-clicking on them. PowerPoint and Impress make you go to the SlideShow menu. Not very intuitive. This is actually a draw between PowerPoint and Keynote, despite this because for all of the benefits of this approach, it becomes harder to know which slides to unskip since you can't see what they look like when they're skipped.
Rehearsing the presentation in Keynote gives you the same view as you get when presenting. If you have the presenter view enabled, this a great help in that you are practicing in the same technical environment as what you will have at show time. PowerPoint doesn't give you the presenter view when you rehearse. It seems as though Microsoft is assuming you won't have those tools available to you when you're presenting live. Where I work, that's the case, probably because the meeting organizers don't know they exist. The thing that PowerPoint has over Impress in this case is the ability to make your rehearsed times available to you when presenting with the presenter view.
Open Office's List of Supported File Formats
The presenter view in Keynote just eats the others for lunch. It's completely customizable and provides far more valuable information. PowerPoint gives you the next two slides and a separate window with the next slide (the same information twice), slide notes, and the current duration. By contrast, Keynote gives you the current slide, the next slide build (rather than the next slide, though it could be the next slide if that's the next build), slide notes, the duration and current time. Keynote also gives you a way to skip ahead and back several slides by moving the mouse cursor to the top of the screen.
Lastly, if there's one thing OpenOffice will beat Apple and Microsoft at, it's file format support. I was going to list the supported formats side-by-side until I saw OpenOffice's list.
Scores:
Keynote: 16, PowerPoint 2008: 14, OpenOffice: 8
Summary
In summary, Keynote, in my opinion holds the edge over PowerPoint, though Microsoft has produced a worthy adversary. Hopefully, the competition will continue to benefit us users in the future. The OpenOffice developers, on the other hand, need to stop imitating old products and start innovating.
Scores:
Keynote: 83, PowerPoint 2008: 72, OpenOffice: 31
Best Buy A Bust
I visited our new Best Buy store, here in Martinsburg, WV. It was a very sad and sick joke. As a Mac user, I was hoping I'd be able to shop locally for my hardware needs, including accessories. It was pretty clear walking out of there that they didn't want my money.
No Macs. Just cheap crap. No Firewire 800 drives in the store either. Simply pathetic. With how well the MacBook Pro is selling today, that's a fist full of stupid.
As if it really matters, here's what I sent them through their contact form:
I visited your new store in Martinsburg, WV today and I have to say I was terribly disappointed. Martinsburg is 2 hours from the nearest Apple store in Tyson's Corner, VA and you wasted an excellent opportunity by not selling Mac hardware or meaningful accessories for that platform. I was prepared to spend lots of our money shopping locally had you seized this chance to serve the Mac community out here.
Now, when I look at your new store, I have nothing to say but, "so what."
It didn't have to be that way.
Their "Contact Us" page did not work properly in Safari 4 either. I think it may be time for the Mac community to band together and boycott that company all together.
The Chart Make-Over Challenge of 2009
As I mentioned in a previous article, I attended the Open Government conference in DC. If you followed my tweets that day, you might remember this one:
If you have to tell the audience in the back that it'll be hard to read your chart, you've got a poorly designed chart. #ogi#ppt
Well, here is the slide in question. It was presented by Aneesh Chopra, the new federal Chief Technology Officer. Though well intentioned, the chart was impossible to read or absorb as a member of the audience.
Your challenge:
Redesign the slide to the right so that the information is more readable and, of course, more effectively reinforces the speaker's message. To participate:
- Redesign the chart slide to the right as one or more slides in PowerPoint, Keynote, or Impress (OpenOffice)
- Post your submission on SlideShare. Please add the keyword of "cc09" and submit it to the Chart Make-Over Challenge 2009 group.
- If you also blog about it, feel free to comment below with a link or email me the link at webmaster@mike-pulsifer.org and I'll post a brief summary here.
The deadline is Noon EST on Sunday, August 16. I'll link to each submission here shortly after the deadline.
Of course, no chart is any good without the context in which it is presented. You can watch the recorded presentation at this link (discussion of this chart starts at about 1:50). For your convenience, a transcript of the relevant portion is below:
Let me be begin with just a phenomenal story about our personal lives. This is a difficult to see graphic for those in the back, but it conveys a very powerful message. This time in our life, we are seeing a tremendous increase in the adoption rate of new technologies. The graphic before you shows how long it took the average American household to adopt an innovation. And you can see over the 30s and 40s as we adopted refrigerators and washing machines and so forth. It took some time. The slope of the S-curve, as they say is growing but not as steep as in the current era. In fact, we’re seeing the adoption of cellphones as an example exceeding those of homes with dishwashers. In fact, if you think about the context, there will be newer and newer services and products that emerge the year post this evaluation, you’ll see the same rapidity. At the same time, we’ll acknowledge we’re at the infancy of this digital era.
Aneesh Chopra - Federal CTO
Shooting Up Frederick
I recently walked about Frederick, MD with a friend of mine and below are the results:
Miscellaneous Photos
Some stuff I once had on SmugMug, now back online, but now on Flickr:
Lose the Lectern
Last week, I attended the Open Government & Innovations Conference in DC where thousands, it seems, of feds got together to pretend they're out-innovating the private sector in the use of Web 2.0 and social media and the implementation of transparency. The keynotes and break-out sessions all suffered from the same problem: detachment from the audience, both physical and emotional. Specifically, with the only available microphone attached to the lectern and no lavalier mics available, the presenters were stuck in one place and were prevented from interacting with the audience. A great example of this is Tim O'Reilly's presentation. Note what he says in the first five seconds.
Lisa Braithwaite has a great post where she discusses why you should avoid the lectern if you can. The first of her three points is that the lectern "creates a physical and psychological barrier between you and the audience." Personally, I'd like to take that a step further. One thing I noticed at the conference was that not only was a barrier there between the presenter and those of us in the audience, but it seemed practically impossible for the speaker to form any sort of emotional connection with the audience. That emotional connection is critical because that is what can drive someone in the audience to act upon your message. If that emotional connection was unnecessary, then all our presentations would need to be are data dumps.
Likely a main reason why people stand behind a lectern, even when they don't have to, is because of the perception of safety. When there's nothing between you and your audience, you're in a more vulnerable position whereas the lectern provides something physical to hide behind should the pitchforks and torches come out (trust me, they won't). However, it is that vulnerability that allows for that emotional connection.
Of course, there will be times when, as was the case at the Open Government conference, you won't be able to free yourself from the lectern. It's in this situation that Lisa makes some excellent suggestions. Another I would add is if your can bend and extend the microphone far enough to the side, do so, and stand to the side of the lectern. Take the initiative to make yourself more vulnerable for the audience. Granted, in most cases, doing this might sit somewhere between a Herculean effort and impossible, but if possible, I'd suggest giving it a try.
Top Image credit:Reith Lectures 2009, used under a Creative Commons license.
