Last week, Apple held their annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. I've been to several of these conferences, and Apple puts on a great show. The sessions of packed full of valuable technical information. For developers, it's like Christmas.
Not only is it a great opportunity for developers to learn from each other as well as Apple Engineers, but it's also a great chance for developers to show off their stuff. Participating developers can submit their applications for review. On the second day of the conference, Apple holds a "Design Awards" event to showcase the best of the best. In some cases, the best comes from large, International development houses. In other cases, it's literally a guy in his garage with a good idea.
Whether you’re in the business of giving presentations, or you only do so on occasion, the following is information that will definitely benefit your ability to create stunning slides. I sit through enough presentations to know what works, and what doesn’t. What do I use as a gauge? My attention. If a presentation can hold my attention for the duration, then I know the presenter has done a great job.
The one thing that most people overlook when presenting is that you are always selling something. You may not be selling a physical, salable product or service, but at the very least, you are selling your ideals and your principals to those in attendance. Having said that, it's important to do your best when preparing to give your presentation. Below are 6 techniques that I use when creating my presentation slide decks.
Picture this... you're on vacation with your family, traveling abroad. You have the perfect shot of the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China or the amazing Egyptian pyramids, except for one problem... there are too many people in the shot!
At this point, you have 3 options:
- You can snap the shot, and be happy with what you have (that's boring)
- You can ask everyone to move out of the way (good luck with that one!)
- You can use PhotoShop automatically remove the people for you
In my opinion, option 3 is the winner, and fortunately, I have a really cool tip to show you how this works.
We LOVE to be social in our neighborhood. About 10 years ago, we thought it would be fun to kick off the first day of Summer (on the last day of school) by showing a movie on our garage door for our family and a few of their friends. We had so much fun with it, that we did it again... and again... and again! By the end of that Summer, we had shown about 5 or 6 movies on our garage for our family, friends and neighbors. We loved it, and they loved it. We loved it so much, in fact, that we decided to make it an annual Summer-time Allgaier tradition.
Fast forward 10 years, and while the technicalities and treats have changed (drastically), the concept is still the same. Each year, on the last day of school, we kick off the Summer by showing a movie on the garage. We show other movies about every 2 - 3 weeks throughout the Summer, until school starts again. We have officially called it "Movie on the Garage" (super creative name, right?). I've had so many people ask me what gear I use now. Interest has been so high, that I thought it would be fun to write a post about it.
Apple Keynote (part of the iWork suite of applications) is an amazing app for getting your point across to others in the form of a slide deck. It's simple to use, comes preloaded with lots of professional-looking templates and offers cinematic-quality animations and transitions. For the average user, pressing "Play" and going through each slide in sequence is perfectly acceptable. For those who command full control over their slide deck (including those who find themselves needing to jump around in the slide deck), there are keyboard shortcuts.
Most people think of keyboard shortcuts as a way to quickly navigate an app (in this case to build your slide deck). In this case, I'm referring to a special set of shortcuts that are only available during a slideshow. Because these shortcuts aren't necessarily easy to find or come across, I wanted to provide a nice cheat sheet of each available keyboard shortcut, as well as a short list of the ones that I use the most.
Let's face it, an iPhone and/or iPad is a pretty hefty investment. Sure, it may only cost $200 -$400 (depending on the model) to purchase a subsidized iPhone from your cell carrier, but have you ever had to replace that phone before your contract is up? You can tack on another $300 or so (depending on your carrier). All of a sudden, a lost device becomes very expensive to replace.
It may not happen every time you lose a device, but in some cases, the finder actually does want to learn who the owner is so that they can return it. We've been taught (and it's good practice) to always use a passcode to protect the data on your device in case it does end up lost. But if the finder can't get into your device, how will they know who it belongs to and how to return it? Simple.
I can't tell you how much time has been wasted over the years when trying to troubleshoot network issues because of poor network documentation. Regardless of the size or complexity of your network, it's always a good idea to have a showing the logical design of your network including information such as IP addressing schemes, devices, servers, etc. This not only applies to business, but also for home (yes, home).
For smaller networks (i.e.: home and small business) , it really doesn't take that long to go through the exercise of diagraming your network. It does, however, take some time to gather the information needed to generate said diagram. It's certainly better to spend that time when things are running smoothly, rather than waiting for a problem to arise. If you wait til then, it will take much longer to resolve your issue without a diagram than it would with a proper diagram.
The ability to take a screenshot of your computer is invaluable for troubleshooting a problem or showing off the latest new app. Taking a screenshot on a Mac is easy (you can get instructions here).
Taking a screenshot on your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch may not be as intuitive, but it's just as easy... once you know how to do it. This tip will make it easy for you.
There are a ton of new features in the new Photos app (released as part of the OS X 10.10.3 update). Most notably is the completely new user interface. It’s clean, simpler to use and matches the experience you have while managing and manipulating photos on your iOS device. Another really nice feature is iCloud Photo Library. In short, this feature allows you to store your entire photo library in the cloud, and access those photos from any Apple product, anywhere.
In some cases, this feature is enabled for you automatically. In others, it’s not. This depends on whether you chose to use iCloud Photo Library when you first launched Photos. Either way, there are a few things that I learned after using iCloud Photo Library in Photos that you need to know about.
The new Photos app (part of OS X 10.10.3) replaces iPhoto... the photo management app that we all grew to love and made part of our personal (dare I say professional?) workflow. Photos is a complete redesign of how we import, manage, edit and share our photos. Personally, I really like the clean interface, and because it feels much like the Photos app on iOS, I felt comfortable with it the first time I launched the app on my MacBook Pro.
Having said that, there are some things about Photos that some users don't appreciate... yet. The interface, for example is one of those things. In iPhoto, there was a Sidebar that gave you a listing of all your albums, Smart Albums, projects, iCloud subscriptions, etc. In an effort to simplify the interface, Apple decided to remove the Sidebar from Photos, but rest assured, it's not completely gone. Here's a simple trick to get it back.
I had a reader recently ask how to use animated GIFs with Apple's new Keynote 6.0. For those who may not know, an animated GIF is a series of images that make up a very short (and usually very low-resolution) video. Animated GIFs became wildly popular in the 90's as the use of public web sites began to catch on. In most cases, these GIF files are meant to be goofy animations (borderline obnoxious). However, there are some real uses for them.
Problem: if you drag and drop an animated GIF onto a slide in Apple's latest version of Keynote (version 6.x), Keynote assumes that it's a non-animated (static) GIF image. In other words, the result is a still picture, not the animated GIF that you would expect to see. Even worse, because Keynote thinks that it's a static image, we don't have access to the video controls to make changes.
While animated GIFs are still supported in Keynote 6.0 and higher, it isn't exactly obvious how to use them. Fortunately, it actually is simple (once you see how it's done the first time).
Final Cut Pro is a great video-editing tool used to build video projects ranging from home movies to full-featured Hollywood films. Increasingly, I am seeing more Instagrammers using it to create and develop content for their Instagram feed, and why not... FCP has some incredible and easy-to-use tools built right into the application.
The challenge that many novice FCP users have is with resolution. FCP likes to be used for HD video content, so when you create a new video project, it defaults to a 1080p workflow. Makes sense for most projects, but not for Instagram. It's too high resolution. Not only that, but the widescreen width to height ratio isn't necessary suitable for Instagram's square ratio. In this TechTalk post, I will walk you through the simple process to begin a new FCP project designed specifically for Instagram.
iMovie for iOS is an extremely powerful tool. Imagine this... you attend an event that you want to share with family, friends, coworkers, etc. You shoot some footage using your 1080p iPhone camera, you edit that video, add titles, effects, transitions, etc. Then once you're done, you upload that finished video to YouTube then share the link with others. Sounds difficult or fictitious, right? Not only is this possible (all from your iPhone or iPad), but simple projects are usually completed in just a few minutes (or even quicker)! I attended an event at my 6-year-old's school last week. Before I walked out of the school, I had edited the video and shared it with family. This is what makes technology so great!
Adding titles in iMovie for iOS can be a bit of a challenge. By default, the title you add will span the entire length of the video clip to which you are adding the title. For example, I filmed the first 10 seconds of a soccer game and added a title to that clip. Rather than the title being displayed for the entire 10 seconds, I only want it to show for the first 2-3 seconds, then disappear. There's an easy fix for that.
Apple's iWork productivity suite provides some pretty amazing templates and themes to choose from when creating documents, spreadsheets and slide decks. Not only are they beautiful, but they are highly customizable.
As beautiful as they are, however, they aren't designed specifically for your needs all the time. In many cases, you want something that reflects your business, your brand and your personality. Sure, you can customize an existing template or theme, but wouldn't it be great to have a predefined template or theme designed just for you? Something that you can use all the time as a basis for your iWork documents? Believe it or not, creating your very own templates and themes is really easy to do, and can save you a huge amount of time.
There are a LOT of reasons why you would want to have an electronic signature on-hand and ready to use... email signatures, signing documents, etc. The question isn't "Will I use an electronic signature?", but rather "What's the easiest way to create an electronic signature?"
There are really two ways to "ingest" a signature into your Mac to use. The first way is by signing a paper and either scanning it in, or using your iSight camera to capture it (more on that here). The other way is where I wanted to focus this post.
