As many of you will know I spend a large percentage of my time creating and delivering presentations and my app of choice for over eight years to create those presentations has been Keynote. Sadly the “update” Apple released late in 2013 removed most of the customization options in the Presenter View.
What started out as a slight annoyance at Apple’s high handed attitude towards the needs of presenters has now reached boiling point for me as over ten months on from that “update” there has still been no improvement to the Presenter View in terms of adding back even some of the previously available customization options.
Recently I had my hopes raised, only for them to be dashed again, when I added a third monitor to my main Mac.
Opening Keynote and entering Presenter View with two external monitors attached gives a completely different display to that experienced with only one external monitor attached. The display takes a few seconds to appear but when it does it is as follows:
It was the configure buttons that gave me hope that a little more customization would be available.
Sadly clicking each of those buttons only revealed the same options as with a single external monitor. It’s still as stubborn in terms of what you can display on each monitor. Removing a specific panel reorganises all the others so it’s either Apple’s way or blank!
I live in hope that one day Apple will realize that each presenter is different and each presentation is different. I don’t want to use the same configuration for delivering live as I do in a webinar or an online session. I know Apple aren’t big on choice but when it comes to delivering presentations using Keynote options are good.
