Beaminster — Dec 1st 2015
There was a really good attendance (the second best since we started) and 23 people heard the two presentations – one from Wayne Bennet, who showed us the best way to make a Keynote presentation. He gave good advice on first assembling all your raw material for the presentation in one place – i.e. graphics and photos as well as text. Next he set up the approximate number of slides he might require to ensure that they were all to the same set-up - and added the hint that if, for example, there were three or four slides based around the same image, or with the same header, simply to duplicate the initial slide so that the fixed elements remained in exactly the same position as the slides progressed. He also gave sage advice: - Don’t have great swathes of text on a slide – keep it brief and easily read. Don’t repeat what is written on the screen. Don’t have a circus load of flash transitions and elements – again keep it plain and save any fireworks for the first and last slides. Well not the first and last actually. He suggested that these should be blank so that while waiting to run the presentation the screen is blank, and similarly at the end.
Following all this excellent and well-presented advice, Michael was understandably a little nervous that his presentation, on apps that extend the capabilities of the Mac Clipboard, would live up to these standards. The start was not auspicious as the same black-screen syndrome took over after the first slide, despite a precautionary trial run at the café on Friday having been successful. Wayne was able to sort the problem out, and Michael was then able to show a limited selection of the 150 apps found on the App Store that said they provided this ability. He narrowed them down to a more manageable 5 – two free, two at 79p, and one, with big capacity (100 clippings) at around £3.00 and one, much more versatile of course, at around £6.00
And of course, as this was our last meeting before Christmas, in addition to the excellent coffee and tea, there were free mince pies!
