The new version of Presentation Remote, 1.5.4, offers something we’ve been hoping to provide for a while: thumbnail previews of slides.
Keynote, unfortunately, even in the new ‘09 version, doesn’t provide thumbnails to other applications – only the plain text of slides. But, if you save your documents with a preview (we recommend setting the Keynote preference “Include preview in document by default”), we can extract that and make good use of it.
Note, if you don’t include a preview in your Keynote document, these preview-based features will be disabled for that presentation (Presentation Remote will warn you if this happens).
If you open up the slide index – either during a presentation, or beforehand – you’ll see that you can now change the list size. In medium or large sizes, a preview of each slide is shown. In small size, the slide index works exactly as in previous Presentation Remote versions – text only.
In Slide View, we now show (in what we think will be a crowd-pleasing move) the upcoming slide, “picture-in-picture” style, in the corner of the screen.
Now, Keynote includes only “finished” slides in the preview, not the build stages. So, the way we handle slides with builds, is to hide the upcoming slide preview until the final build step, at which point we show the preview of the next slide (in its finished state).
Also, while waiting for the full-screen image to be sent across the network, we show the thumbnail as a placeholder.
And of course, if you find these features distracting, you can turn them off in the Presentation Remote settings.