MacGetIT

Had a presentation yesterday at Creative Connections Meetup in Denver and it went well and it was the first time that I had used Apple’s iPhone Keynote Remote ($0.99) with Keynote.

I had used it in “trial” mode at home checking it out, but was a little concerned about using it on another network. At home it was very simple to set up because of the WiFi setup with my Mac laptop, but there are some steps to take in order to get it to work elsewhere. Here are the steps to take.

1. You have to have  a WiFi network for both your laptop and iPhone/iPod Touch Keynote Remote to work. The iTunes store does NOT say this in the requirements space, but it is essential.
2. Start your Mac and connect both your Mac and iPhone to the WiFi network.
3. Start up iWork’s Keynote presentation software and open up your presentation.
4. In Keynote under Preferences select the Remote icon and connect your iPhone/iPod Touch to your Mac (I’ll say it here, when I went to the new network I had to “Unlink” my iPhone and “Link” it up again on the new network to get it working). Enter in the code on your Mac to link them up.
5. Start the iPhone’s Keynote Remote software.
6. Once you’re completely connected you’ll see a button on the bottom to “Play Slideshow” or another style button depending on the status of Keynote and your Mac.

The only thing that was a little troublesome is reconnecting the iPhone to the Mac and Keynote via the “linking” part once you change networks. Once that was done it was straight forward.

Using it was also straight forward, you just swipe the “slides” left and right to view them. The best part is seeing the Presenter notes on the bottom of each slide. This is nice because you don’t have to look up at your slide, you can look at your iPhone.

Overall I’d give it a 4 out of 5.

Let me know what you think of this software.

Updated 1/23/2010: Make sure you turn your iPhone to Airplane Mode as this will prevent any calls from interrupting your presentation.