Thread by @movito

This is the best presenter remote out there if you’re running big events.

It’s expensive, and it is not good looking. But it lets you command two computers at once, reliably.

This is the remote that WWDC speakers use. Welcome to the A/V market, where good design is a rarity.

We have to explain to speakers which button is which. That’s how bad the graphics on the remote are. The ergonomics and range, however, have not let us down yet.

Why two computers at once? Who the heck needs to present from to machines, simultaneously?

Because good speakers become even better speakers when they have confidence monitors showing:
- what is on the screen behind them
- what’s up next
- how much time do they have left

Yeah, you can wrangle all the screens you need in Keynote, or in PowerPoint for PC. But not for Mac, sadly, so you need once machine showing the speaker notes, and one showing the presentation.

This requires an extra laptop, but spares you much fiddling with settings.

Then there’s the matter of range. Sure, you can use a small, handheld remote and have your computer up on stage with you.

This will make your talk look like every other talk, ever, because you can’t move around freely and engage with the audience.

Plus, you’ll turn around and look at the screen behind you.

Hey, it’s your talk. Do it however you want.

But from the event organizer’s point of view, it’s all about helping a speaker succeed.

Which is why all this equipment is needed when you’re running a big event.

The amount of energy and investment required to lift an event from the average talk to above average and memorable, is at least an order of magnitude.

But it makes new speakers good, and good speakers better. Because they can engage with the audience, and not have to check where they are in their deck and how long they have left. It’s a happy case of technology making things better, in a reliable way, workout too much fuss.

But really, all this technology is required because no one, AFAIK, has made a great system for managing talk assets and timings at bigger events. It’s a hodgepodge of specialized tools that are reliable, but hard to understand how to use.

We need their capabilities, redesigned.

We need a compact setup that lets you show slides on the big screen, and on the confidence monitor, the deck and the notes (why can’t different presenter view setups be stored by an app? Absurd.)

We need all of this to be designed to suit the context, the goals and the users, and make it easier to create great events, without so much costly fuss.

Confidence monitors are generally terrible. Terrible stands, bad screens, cumbersome transport.

So we made our own. They aren’t perfect, but they are pretty good.

Have you come up with a good setup for making presentations work better? Designed your own equipment for events? If so, I’d love to see what you’ve done.