I like to think of myself as an objective computer user. I try not to take sides in the age old battle of which operating system is better. However, as an employee of Small Dog, I tend to use Macs almost exclusively, and sometimes Apple surprises me with neat features that I didn’t know OS X had.
Did you know that you can share a Keynote presentation with a remote viewer via the Messages app?
I had no idea that this was a feature of Mountain Lion. In fact, I can recall using the 3rd party app GoToMeeting for a few Webinars in the past, but this new feature could, in some cases, eliminate the need for that.
If you want to share a presentation via Messages, there are a few things that need to happen beforehand. First, as the presenter, you need to have Keynote installed on your machine and a Keynote presentation you want to share. After that, you need to make sure that you and your viewers are using the same messaging service like iCloud or AIM.
Once you have the required stuff out of the way, you can start by inviting someone from your Buddy List to a video chat. To do this, select whomever you want to share your presentation with from your Buddy List and choose “Invite to Video Chat” from the “Buddies” menu. This will send an invitation to initiate a video chat and once the recipient accepts, you can move on.
To get the presentation rolling, locate your Keynote presentation file in Finder and drag it into the lower part of the video chat window. (Apple couldn’t have made this part any easier!) This will launch Keynote on your Mac, and you will see some presentation controls pop up.
To navigate through your presentation, simply click in the controller window to advance the slide. Alternatively, you can click on the arrows to step forward or backward. When you want to stop the presentation, just click the “X” in the controller window. After that, the window will go back to the normal video chat screen.
So there you go. Now you can give a remote presentation to anyone, anywhere, provided that they have the basic requirements I mentioned above. Give it a try and wow someone from across the room or across the country!