I am doing a presentation today at work, and when I was digging
through my desk to find the DVI->VGA converter that came with my Mac,
I came across the little remote control that also came with it. I
thought it would be cool to put it to good use by using it to flip
slides, rather than running up to the keyboard all the time.
I use NeoOffice (a port of
OpenOffice.org to OS X), not
because it is pretty (it's not), but because it cheap and does a good
enough job of emulating Microsoft Office. I haven't tried Keynote, but it sure
looks slick, and it turns out it's not as expensive as I had heard
(upwards of $300!). Turns out it is only $89 for iWork '06, which
includes a word processor (Pages). Not that I
ever use a word processor (hooray for text files and typesetting
software!). I think a demo of iWork was installed on my Mac when I got
it, but it seems to have been deleted....
Anyway, to get the remote control to handle flipping slides in
NeoOffice, I first tried iRed Lite, because it is
free. However, the interface is quite amateurish, and it isn't able to
control NeoOffice Impress, although it can apparently control
OpenOffice Impress. It is also necessary to manually select the
"profile" to use; it doesn't automatically control whatever program is
in the foreground. One good thing is that you can press and hold the
menu button to enable or disable iRedLite, so that you can easily get
back to the default Front Row behaviour.
I then tried Remote
Buddy. Wow. For about $14.47 CAD, you get a much slicker
interface, the ability to automatically control whatever is in the
foreground, AND, out-of-the-box support of NeoOffice Impress. I'm just
taking advantage of the 60 day demo, but if I were to use the remote a
lot more (unlikely), this might be a worthwhile purchase! The only bad
thing is that because the menu button always brings up the remote
buddy menu, and because holding the menu button is often assigned to a
task in an application, it is necessary to use command-esc to bring up
front row. Which is not quite as simple and just pushing the menu
button on the remote. Oh well.
There are a few other remote control programs out there, such as Mira and Sofa Control. Amit Singh also has more
technical information on the IR device and how to use it, along with a
little irdaemon
that can be used to control applications.
Now that I've wasted an hour playing with the remote control and
watching movie trailers with Front Row, I guess I should finish
working on my presentation...
