I hope you’re having a good Saturday! It’s a beautiful day here in London, I’ve been out in the park catching some sun.
I also got confirmation that the latest Presentation Remote update is in the App Store. It’s a relatively small update, mostly tidying up a few details to do with default settings, but you can also now choose to mute your computer’s sound whenever the screen is blanked (thanks to one of our customers for suggesting this).
We also updated Presentation Manager to version 1.5.9 to match. The big news here is that we’ve changed how automatic builds are handled.
Normally, when you have builds (eg to reveal bullets points one-by-one), Presentation Remote displays something like “0/3” (for a slide with three bullet points) and follows along as you reveal each one.
With automatic builds, Keynote unfortunately moves through the builds “secretly” – it doesn’t let Presentation Remote know what’s going on, so we can’t follow along. This was sometimes confusing! Once you hit the next slide, Presentation Remote figures out what happened and syncs, but still – we’d prefer not to get out of sync in the first place.
So what we’ve done now, is that Presentation Manager detects which builds are automatic, and only displays manual builds in its progress indicator. So, instead of telling you how many builds there are, it tells you how many builds you neeed to step through, to reach the end of the slide.
So, if you see “2/3”, then no matter how many automatic builds there are, you know that if you step forward once, you’ll be on the last build (3/3), and if you step forward again, you’ll be on the next slide. If a slide’s animations are all automatic, Presentation Remote won’t count any builds at all – since you just sit back and let Keynote take care of it.
Hopefully this will make things clearer for those of you who make extensive use of automatic builds!