When the Carinthian branch of WKO – a public office supporting the local economy – contacted me to hold a workshop at a tech fair I jumped at the chance. Not just because I like the limelight, but also because it was my first opportunity to make extensive use of Keynote.
I had only played a bit around with Keynote so far, but did not have any reason yet to put together a full slide deck, animations and all. It took me a day or so to figure out all the features of Keynote I needed to make my presentation worthy of one representing Apple. To top it off I was wearing a black T-Shirt with a white Apple on my chest.
Due to bad weather we had less than half of signed up people actually attend the workshop, so I was able to include several of the attendees and their personal reasons for looking into app development. Funny, how I feared that I could never fill 4 hours with interesting material. Only to find out that I did and I ended perfectly on time.
Due to the setup in the workshop room I could not have stood behind the bar table on which my MacBook Air rested. People would either not have seen me, or I would have been casting a large shadow onto the slides. Instead I had to stand on the other side of the stage. From this distance you want to be able to control your slideshow and possibly be able to see the currently showing slide without having to turn around all the time, thus losing your audience connection.
You can either use the Apple Remote to control Keynote, or way cooler, the remote control app which is available on the app store. I had to have the WiFi technician disable Access Point isolation so that my iPhone would be able to my MacBook. Strangely it does not work over Bluetooth even though both devices have that.
For speaking I had a headset hanging over both ears and with the sender in my back pocket. The friendly local media technician provided a hand microphone to pass around so that people would be able to hear their peers’ questions. It was a very good idea to check out the stage and tech on the evening before the event to familiarize myself with the setup. Also I was able to make sure that my Mini-Displayport-To-VGA dongle would work well.
To avoid being disturbed on my iPhone I disabled push notifications for tweets as well as set it to airplane mode. Then I re-enabled WiFi. This way the battery easily lasted the entire duration of the presentation.
Sorry if the presentation is of little use to you being in German, but you can still look at the pretty pictures and infer some meaning from them. 😉
Von der App Idee zum App Store Erfolg
If you recognize some of the contents then that might be because I heavily borrowed from some talks held by Apple, especially “Ingredients of Great iPhone Apps” which you can view on the iOS Development Videos site.
I found that one great way of including snippets from other sources simply by means of adding them as screenshot and then putting a photo frame around it. If it is a picture to have the frame with the shadow at the bottom. For snippets the torn edge looks fabulous. In some instances it made more sense to quickly transcribe the percentages for a pie chart or the cells of a table into Keynote to have a more consistent look.
Taking a page out of Steve’s book I liberally sprinkled several slides throughout the presentation just containing a single word or number as well as several that quoted a popular adage. I couldn’t avoid having some bullet lists, but having them mixed with other types of content worked rather well, as opposed to a presentation that would consist of nothing BUT bullets.
Apparently my presentation was well received, quite a few attendees where interested in getting my slides. So to them I provided the original Keynote file as well as a PDF “Printout”. But for the general public I uploaded the PDF version to Scribd where it now resides for your viewing pleasure.
Lastly I want to give some props to the advertising agency fussi.at organizing the e_day for WKO. Their professionalism and friendly manner in which they helped me get organized and set up was clearly part of the reason why the 4-hour event went so well.
Categories: Education
Hello Oliver,
Thank you very much for the informative lecture you gave in the course of e-days in Klagenfurt. Four hours are simply too short to elaborately deal with a topic that complex. Though, thanks to your outstanding presentation, we all gained great insight into this matter.
Yours truly,
Roland Wunder