04 Jul 4 Apps To Deliver Knock Out Presentations With Your iPad
Following on from our post on presentation apps for Android Tablets, check out these 4 fantastic apps to create memorable, knockout presentations with your iPad.
Keynote ($10.49)
Apple’s very own presentation app, Keynote, is a great app for putting together that big, important presentation on the fly.
The app features a Theme Chooser, that provides the user with 44 Apple-designed themes to choose from. Once you’ve chosen your theme, simply substitute your own words and images for the placeholder text and graphics. To spruce up your presentation further, Keynote has built in graphics tools, which allows you to remove the backgrounds of pictures or mask it with a predrawn shape (such as a circle or a star). To ensure objects are spaced evenly and in line with each other, the app offers alignment and spacing guides, helping you create professional looking slides.
If you’re not looking to create a presentation, you can import presentations created in Microsoft PowerPoint or export presentations you have created as PowerPoint files. Keynote also allows you to export your presentation as a QuickTime movie or a PDF, HTML, or image file or even directly to YouTube.
To give your presentations a little more pizzazz, Keynote has 25 transitions (including 3D transitions), to choose from. Animations for text or object are also available, to really drive home your message. Animations aren’t just limited to text and pictures though! You can make your charts really stand out with 3D textures and animations, such as beveled edges or a radial animation effect.
Along with creating the presentation, Keynote also lets you share your brilliant presentation with your colleagues, partners or customers easily. Using the Presenter Display feature (while your audience enjoys the show on the main display) you can view the current and following slides, your slide notes, a clock and a timer on a second display. In landscape view, see the current and next slides. In portrait, see the current slide with your slide notes. Tap to play and swipe to advance, wherever you are in the room. The built-in narration tool allows you to capture audio, while also timing the narration to the animations or transitions between slides. If you like to move around while presenting, you can use a Keynote Remote to turn your iPad into a wireless controller.
SlideShark (Free)
If you’re merely after a way to have your presentation ready to go whenever and wherever you are, SlideShark is a great app.
SlideShark offers its users a secure cloud-based account with 100MB free storage (with extra storage space available for a fee), where you can upload your presentation files. This allows you to access your presentation on your computer, iPhone or iPad wherever you are and display it on an external display. If you have some members that can’t attend the presentation, you can broadcast your slides in real time to remote attendees. It also supports offline presentations when presenting in-person.
When presenting in-person, your iPad runs the show. Just tap or swipe to advance animations and slides or swipe up to go to specific slides and access more features. When in ‘Presenter Mode’, you can see slide notes, timers and animation counter, as well as being able to annotate slides while presenting. SlideShark allows you to control your presentation via your iPhone, which acts as a remote controller and laser pointer when you use your iPad to present.
Post-presentation is almost as important as the presentation itself, as attendees usually want access to the slides or extra presentation material after the meeting has taken place. SlideShark allows you to share an online version of your slides (either through email or social media), with tracking of viewer behaviour available to you so you can see just how engaged your audience was.
Noteshelf $6.49
For brainstorming sessions or when you just need to visually demonstrate a concept, Noteshelf is a fantastic whiteboard app for the iPad.
Hook your iPad up to an external display (via Apple’s VGA adapter) and you have an instant whiteboard that you can share with everyone attending the meeting. Notes are saved in notebooks, which are organised into a visual bookshelf with a title and cover of your choosing. The editing tools are comprehensive, with a wide range of ink pens, pencils and highlighters to capture great ideas, which you can use either with your finger or a stylus. It supports cut/copy/ paste functions to move or duplicate notes, with users also able to paste notes from Noteshelf into other apps like email.
For diagrams or other pictures, you can embed and annotate photos. You can even take a photo directly from Noteshelf and use it within notes without switching between Noteshelf and the camera app. With unlimited undo/redo capabilities, you’ll be able to take notes and make changes on the fly, great for a fast paced meeting with lots of great ideas!
Following a productive brainstorming session, you would probably want to share the notes with the attendees. Noteshelf offers users the ability to email, tweet, print or post the notes to Facebook directly from within the app. You can also export your notes to Evernote or dropbox as a PDF or image file.
Presentation Clock ($0.99)
One of the biggest challenges with presenting is keeping within the alloted time. It’s so easy to go over, particularly if you’re passionate about the topic or you have a wealth of information, all of which you believe the audience MUST know.
Presentation Clock is simply a giant timer, with a few really cool features to really help you nail your presentation succinctly. It features large, easy to read numbers and offers the added bonus of allowing you to customise the timer to change colours (green, yellow, red) based on thresholds you determine. You can customise other notifications such as audible or vibration alerts when crossing a customised time limit threshold just in case you don’t want to keep looking at the timer. The timer doesn’t just stop when it hits zero, but to give you a good idea of just how much over the time you are, the colours invert (black on red) and continue counting up. Presentation Clock also allows you to display the timer on an external display via the TV Out adapter.
Bonus: Outliner for iPad ($5.49)
The key to a knockout presentation is undoubtedly the preparation and organisation of ideas.
This is where Outliner for iPad is a great app to have handy, as it allows you to jot down and organise your ideas in an outline format, giving you a great overview of your presentation.
You can use the app to create outlines full of notes, structured lists, tasks or detailed projects, as well as organise them though tags and a great search function. If you’ve added in tasks to do, such as researching your topic or finding great quotes, you can get a quick view of your progress via the pie chart which indicates percentage completed.
To work on your outline wherever you are, you can sync your outlines to Outliner Online or Dropbox for web or desktop editing, which also lets you share your outline with other Outliner users for collaboration. The editor uses drag and drop functionality for moving items around within an outline. Copy, paste and undo, redo are also supported.
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What apps do you use for creating or delivering great presentations on your iPad?