Presentations made fast and simple
You come into work one day, and realise half way through the morning that you're due to give a presentation in the afternoon. There's no way that is enough time to create a presentation using Keynote or Powerpoint, however with Impromptu you can create a presentation in minutes, and give the presentation using your iPhone and Apple AV adapter plugged into a projector. Problem solved! All for less than the cost of your morning coffee.
Brought to you by Splinter Software. More apps here.
Impromptu presentations are plain text files, formatted with Markdown, with exclamation marks with blank lines either side used to separate slides.
The idea is that on your Mac/PC you create this file using a markdown/text editor, and save the file to your Dropbox folder somewhere.
Then, on your phone you launch the Impromptu app, which can download your presentation from Dropbox. With an Apple AV adapter connecting your iPhone/iPad to a projector, you’re all set to give your presentation, no fuss.
An example presentation file looks like below, with the ‘!’ slide separators:
First slide
===========
* Talking point
* And another point
!
Second slide
------------
Lets have a discussion
about the first slide.
!
Last slide
----------
How about *italic* or **bold**?
Markdown is a common way of writing used by writers and programmers, used to quickly produce documents that are able to be nicely formatted when read by certain software. Markdown formatted text looks like follows:
This is a heading
=================
This is a subheading
--------------------
* These
* Are
* Bullet
* Points
Blah blah *this is italics*
Blah blah **this is bold**
For further help with how to use Markdown, visit: daringfireball.net
This app requires you to have a Dropbox account, so that you can keep your presentations synced between your computer and your iPhone/iPad. If you don’t already have a Dropbox account, get one – it’s a great service (and its free). Visit: Dropbox.com
If you have a Mac as your main computer, I recommend Mou for editing your presentations. Visit: Mouapp.com
If you use a PC as your main computer, I recommend MarkdownPad for editing your presentations. Visit: MarkdownPad.com.
There are also numerous plain-text editors you can choose from to edit your presentations. Some options include:
Feel free to get in touch with me at chris.hulbert@gmail.com with any suggestions, or for help with anything - I'd be glad to help!