Presenter, On Sale!

I’m very happy to announce that my first application is finally available on the iPhone App Store today!

You can check out a description of Presenter at: http://presenterapp.net/features

Presenter pairs with your Mac over WiFi to let you control Keynote & PowerPoint presentations from your iPhone. Upright, view your speaker notes in Georgia 38pt, white-on-black (a bit more attractive & easier to read than Helvetica 16pt, brown-on-yellow, no?).

Turn your phone sideways, and you get a ‘Not Cover Flow’ interface, displaying high quality previews of all the slides in your stack. Flick through them to see what’s coming up, or double tap a slide to navigate to that position in your show. Check out this short video to see how it works.

The Mac server portion of Presenter installs as a System Preference pane. The Presenter Server runs in the background as a launchd process. Pairing is very familiar—Enter a 4 digit code from your iPhone into the Mac System Preference pane. The Presenter Server communicates with your iPhone over an SSL encrypted channel, generates strong passwords, and stores them in your Mac’s & iPhone’s keychains. Once you are paired, authentication happens seamlessly to the user (thank you, Bonjour), and all communication back & forth is secure. Big thanks to Deusty Designs for the robust CocoaAsyncSocket CFSocket & CFStream wrapper library. For the Mac OS X Keychain interaction, ExtendMac has a terrific Cocoa wrapper, EMKeychain. Finally, I’m also using Andy Matuschak’s wonderful Sparkle engine to keep the System Preference pane up to date.

The Presenter Server talks with PowerPoint and Keynote over AppleScript. Oddly enough, generating high quality previews of each slide was one of my biggest challenges. I’ll write up a post about how I did this later, but you might notice that neither Keynote nor PowerPoint’s AppleScript libraries expose any easy-to-use slide preview generator. Some other remotes out there take screenshots of what is visible on the Mac’s screen, shrink it down, then send it to the iPhone. This isn’t good enough; it requires the user to flip through every slide on his computer before being able to see the images on the iPhone. Also unhelpful, Keynote embeds teeny-tiny, low resolution previews of its slides inside the file format. PowerPoint’s file format is…well, kind of awful.

Today, I’m just happy and relieved to finally have an application available on the iPhone App Store. I’m not expecting to get rich from this venture…I’m just pleased to finally be able to say that I write commercial Mac OS X software—and not a farting, tip calculator, flashlight, either. (Sorry to disappoint, Presenter does not contain PEE, yet).