iPod Smash Laptop!

It's not exactly a huge secret that you can use a photo-enabled iPod to make presentations with. Just export out your slides as still images, sync 'em to the iPod, hook it to a TV or projector, fire up slideshow mode, and you're in business. What? You've never done that? Well, let's rectify that situation and see if we can't make you the superfly-est presenter around.

What you'll need

• Some way to create a presentation (Keynote 1 or 2, PowerPoint, hell, any program that can save still images will suffice)
• A color-screen, photo-enabled, full-size iPod (sorry, the Nano won't do since it has no video out)
• Either the $19 Apple AV Cable or any camcorder cable you have lying around
• A TV or projector

Once you're done gathering the list of ingredients, you're ready to roll. The first thing you need to do is create a presentation. Do anything you want—scan in some stick figures if you like. Do an interpretive dance and take digital photos of it. Sky's the limit. While you do that, though, you ideally would need know where the final presentation is going to happen. I issue that particular warning at this point because if your presentation is going to be shown on a regular ol' television (not one of those fancy-schmancy progressive-scan jobs), there are a couple of things to keep in mind when you create your presentation:

• Even modern TVs still tend to cut off the edges of whatever is showing, so to be safe, give yourself at least a 10% buffer all the way around that content (especially text) needs to be clear of.
• Avoid single-pixel horizontal lines—they can get jittery on TV sets.
• Along those same lines (ha!), sans-serif fonts tend to work better on TV than serif fonts (which can, at certain sizes, also become jittery along their thin edges). Regardless, make sure to keep all fonts large enough to be legible.
• For the love of Pete, don't cram your slides so full of garbage that nothing stands out. This goes for all presentations, not just TV-based ones, but it's especially ugly on a TV. Simplicity is bliss—just ask Steve Jobs.
• Be careful with reds. They like to bleed into other areas on a TV screen. I'm not saying don't use them; only to be careful.

With those hints out of the way, I trust by now that your presentation, regardless of how you've created it, is ready to go. Your challenge at this point now becomes converting said presentation into a series of images that the iPod will eventually serve up.

PowerPoint

For PowerPoint users, exporting out to an image sequence is trivial. On either platform, choose File:Save As, and then select TIFF from the format drop-down menu (fig. 1). On the Mac, PowerPoint will automatically save the image series into its own folder, while on some versions of PowerPoint on Windows, it will ask you if you want to save each slide as a single image. Either way, PowerPoint will do its thing, and you'll be left with an image for each slide in your presentation. Unfortunately (and somewhat obviously), transitions and builds don't come along for the ride, so if you want to do bullet-by-bullet builds, you'll have to create your presentation to handle those builds on individual slides.

Figure 1

Keynote

Those of you that are Keynote fanatics can pretty much do the same thing as the PowerPointers and export out your slides as TIFF images. Granted, only Keynote 2 has such functionality; Keynote 1 users, your chosen version lacks such a simple export option, so you can do one of the following:

• Export to a PowerPoint file and save your images from there, or
• Export to a QuickTime movie and then save out an image sequence using QuickTime Pro (which is $30, but whaddayagonnado, you know?).

...And the rest

Now, for you hardcore types out there that don't need no stinkin' presentation program and already have created a series of images, you're already set. Sort of. You see, the format of the images is somewhat irrelevant; however, since every bit of crispness helps (especially when you output to a TV), I suggest saving images in an uncompressed format that iTunes will ultimately understand, such as TIFF (like we already did for the PowerPoint export). JPEG is fine too, but remember that JPEG uses lossy image compression, which could result in blockiness or artifacts. That won't help matters at all, especially when you consider that iTunes is going to prep the images for transport to the iPod anyway. So it's best to start off pristine, rather than putting your images in a scenario where they might be squeezed twice.

Fun with file management!

OK. Now that we're all at the same place (with gobs and gobs of beautiful presentation-ready TIFF files), we can sync 'em to the iPod. If you're on Windows, the easiest thing to do is just move the images to your My Pictures folder (which is inside the My Documents folder). You'll also need to make subfolders inside of the My Pictures folder (fig. 2) for each presentation—iTunes will interpret these folders as slideshows, which is critical to this working once we get over to the iPod.

Figure 2

Mac users, iPhoto is the way to go, provided you have it. I'm sure you don't want to blow away pictures of your kids or dogs or whatever just to put a few presentations on your iPod, so let's use iPhoto to manage the presentation images as well. Fire up iPhoto, create an album for your presentation, and then just drag the images in (fig. 3). Make sure they loaded themselves in the right order, and that's it.

Figure 3

If you don't happen to have iPhoto, just do what the Windows folks did—create a presentations folder somewhere on your hard drive, and then create subfolders for each presentation, stashing the individual images in there.

Allrighty then—time to take this party over to iTunes.

iTunes' turn

We don't need to be here long—we just need enough time to move our images over to the iPod. So attach your iPod to your Mac or PC and launch iTunes (which may happen automatically depending on how you've set your iPod options). Once it's up and running, and you see your iPod sitting happily amongst your Library and Playlists, you'll need to open the Preferences pane (Command+Comma/Mac or Control+Comma/Win). Click the iPod icon (Mac) or tab (Win), and then select the Photos tab. iTunes will give you the opportunity to sync either your iPhoto Library or My Pictures folder, as well as select individual slideshows to sync (fig. 4).

Figure 4

If you've directed your presentation images to another folder, iTunes lets you choose an alternate location as well. You can also choose to include the full-resolution images, which will be available to the host computer when the iPod is in disk mode. Anyway, select wherever it was you put your images, close the Preferences pane, and iTunes will get to work syncing your images to the iPod. Once that's done, eject and disconnect the iPod, and then it's onto the next phase of our nefarious plan.

What to do with this confounded iPod

Let's examine the iPod's Photo settings to see what we can see here. From the main menu, navigate to Photos, which should give you a menu (fig. 5):

Figure 5

Sorry about the absolutely hideous image. I am many things, but a professional (or even competent) photographer is not one of them. But you can at least see what's going on there, and what I see is good: my slideshow made it over. Let's click on Slideshow Settings and see what's doing on that screen (fig. 6):

Figure 6

Yes, again, pathetic picture. But if you can get past my complete inability to sharply capture the iPod screen, you'll see that we've arrived at the "meat" of the iPod as a presentation device. Let's go through these one by one:

Time per slide. You can set the interval at which slides auto-advance. Most of the time you'll probably want this set to Manual, though, so you can go forward and back at whatever rate you're talking at.

Music. No music is an option, of course, but if you want to sync your presentation to a music or voice track, just set up a playlist in iTunes (or use Now Playing or an On-the-go Playlist) containing the audio you want to accompany the presentation.

Repeat. Set this to On if you want your slides to loop.

Shuffle Photos. Unless you want the lecture hall or boardroom version of "Chef's Surprise," I'd leave this set to Off.

Transitions. The iPod has 12 built-in transitions that mimic the ones found in Keynote. Unfortunately, they're not as butter-smooth as the ones in Keynote, nor can they be set on a per-slide basis, but they still look pretty nice.

TV Out. This can be set to On, Off, or Ask. I usually just leave it set to Ask, and that way I'm covered regardless of whether I have the iPod hooked up to a TV or not.

TV Signal. NTSC is the signal used in the US; many other parts of the world are on the PAL standard. Make sure you know the signal beforehand!

As you can see, you have a lot of options, which isn't bad considering that all we're doing is prettying up some still images.

The moment of truth

Time to put this thing on TV. First, you need to connect it. Apple sells a $19 AV connector for the iPod, which is certainly an option. You can also use an Apple or third-party Dock. Or, you can enlist a standard camcorder cable, and using this hint that I only wish I could take credit for figuring out, flip the connectors around to produce a perfectly usable signal.

With iPod connected, it's time to route the signal to the TV. Now, one of the things that is somewhat irksome for the uninitiated is that the controls for starting a slideshow in actual slideshow mode aren't inherently obvious. There are, in actuality, two ways to start a slideshow. The first is to select the slideshow from the Photos menu, and instead of hitting the center button, push the Play button. The second way is to enter the slideshow normally using the center button, view the first slide in the show by again pressing the center button, and then pressing the center button one more time to start the slideshow. In either case, if you have TV Out set to Ask, you'll have to select TV Off or TV On from the menu. Or, if you have TV Out set to On, the slideshow will just start (fig. 7):

Figure 7

For the third time, apologies for the picture, but shooting TVs and LCD screens is, shall we say, a challenge. Anyway, there you have it. The cool thing is that while the slide itself is being routed to the TV, the iPod screen shows a thumbnail of the current slide as well as smaller previews of the next and previous slides.

Other tips

Now that you have the basics down, you can start thinking about other ways to use your newfound ultimate power. First, though, it may be a good idea to have a black frame or some other buffer slide at both the beginning and end of your presentation, so viewers won't be subjected to your fumbling to start the show. Other than that, experiment! Practice with various sound and voice tracks to create a hybrid hosted/self-running presentation. Set the Time Per Slide to an interval of your choosing, set a music or voice track, turn Repeat on, and use the iPod to demo items unattended at a trade show booth (for example). And while the sky isn't exactly the limit, there are some scenarios where the iPod can be not only a suitable replacement for a laptop, but may even be a better solution.

Filed under: Tutorial on December 16th, 2005

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