In this article I reviewed the Logitech wireless presenter. It is in my opinion the best remote control to use with Keynote. That particular Logitech remote has been replaced by the new Logitech R400 which is just as good.   The only problem with it (as with the old model) is that it has 2 small buttons, one which completely exits out of your keynote presentation!  The last thing you want is to press the wrong button and be taken out of your keynote back to the desktop.

With the old model you needed to unsolder the switch beneath the buttons to disable them but with the new model they can simply be disabled with a knife. This article describes how to disable the extra 2 buttons.  It really is a simple procedure and doesn’t even require any soldering!

What you need:

- A logitec wireless presenter R400

- A small phillips head screwdriver

- A small knife with a sharp point.

Step 1. Remove the battery cover, remove the sticker that covers the screws underneath the batteries, and undo the 2 screws.

Step 2. Prise off the back cover with a screwdriver or knife.

Step 3. The buttons are a small dome shaped piece of metal held on with a clear plastic contact. Carefully cut the clear sticky tape covering around the bottom 2 buttons with a knife.

Step 4. Now you can simply remove the dome shaped part of the button, it is only held on by the tape.

Step 5. Here is what it looks like with the button removed. Do this for both the bottom 2 buttons and then reassemble the remote.

If you also want to disable the laser pointer you can do the same with the top button, the fifth button.

 

When you reassemble the  remote control it will look identical from the outside,  but when you press the smaller 2 buttons at the bottom they will no longer click and they will no longer do anything.

So now you have a very reliable Keynote remote control that will just move the presentation one slide forward or backwards with no way to accidently exit from the presentation!

When you plug in a second monitor to Macintosh computer, it may display an exact copy or ‘mirror image’ of what is on your first display.  This is called mirroring.  This is fine if you are doing a presentation and you want to see on your laptop screen exactly what is on the projector,  but it’s not very useful at home to have the same thing on both screens. If you’d like to see different things on each screen, so the second screen gives you more desktop space, you need to turn mirroring off. Here’s how.

1.Go to’ system preferences’  in the Apple menu,  and then to ‘ displays’  and  click on the ‘arrangement’  tab.

2. Deselect the box that says ‘ Mirror Displays’

3. You have now turned off mirroring and should have two separate desktops!

NOTE:

On some machines,  for example lower end of iBooks and iMacs,   to differentiate them from the higher models, Apple have disabled the ability to have two separate displays so that your external monitor is permanently mirroring what is on your main monitor.

There is a program that can re-enable this feature to turn on the ability to have a separate second display.  It’s  called  screen spanning doctor. It automatically checks that your Mac is able to run a second monitor and then makes the appropriate changes. You can download it from here.

This is the inspector window. It is is Pages and Keynote and you use it to adjust things. To access different inspector panes you click the appropriate icon – document, text, shapes, rulers etc. Here’s a great tip: If you hold down option while clicking it will open a new inspector window alongside the existing one!

You can have more than one inspector window open at a time. Simply option-click the icon instead of clicking it and a second inspector window will open.

After the window opens you can move it where you want it to be.

To open multiple inspector windows just use option click when clicking an icon in the inspector window.

To change the answers, go to the master page, and edit the text fields that have the answers, be careful not to move any fields around, just edit the text in them.

To play the game, start the slideshow at slide number 6.
If there is a corrrect answer guessed, click on the appropriate box to reveal that answer – complete with sound efffects!
For a wrong answer, click anywhere on the background.

Here is a link to the keynote templates – there are two versions:

This is a very big version that takes a long time to load but has the ‘wrong’ sounds in it:

http://macintoshhowwto.com/public/ff.zip

This is a smaller version that needs the ‘wrong’ sounds to be played from an ipod but is much faster to load.

http://macintoshhowwto.com/public/familyfeud.zip

Here are the rules from wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_feud#Rules_of_the_game

Let me know how it goes!

Here’s a goot tip from Stacey:

Thank you so much for your work! This is awesome – perfect as a review game for my students. But, I was able to make more questions on the same presentation rather than saving a bunch of files. I just copied the two master slides (“Sound” and “No sound”) and renamed them (“Question 2 Sound” and “Question 2 No Sound”). Then I typed in my second question on the two new master sides. Next, I copy/pasted the sequence of 34 possible answer slides and reapplied the “Question 2 Sound” and “Question 2 No Sound” to the appropriate slides. I ended up making about 25 different questions in one file. Thanks again!

This Logitech presenter is great. After using the ATI remote wonder for a year or so, and a Microsoft cordless mouse also, I’ve done a bit of research, and came up with these little units as the as the best in my opinion. They are $79 at Officeworks and have all the features you need…

• a long range.
• works with keynote or powerpoint.
• the battery display indicates that the remaining battery life with little bars, so you’re not caught out with a flat battery. 
• the forward and back controls click, so you can feel that you have pressed them.
• if you have a time to end by, eg you are presenting to a group on a timetable, you can set up the timer, it gives you 5 min and 2 minute vibration warnings.
• It has volume up and down which automatically work on the mac with no setting up.
• the usb receiver stows away in the transmitter, and it all comes in a little padded pouch.
• it doesn’t need any drivers for Macintosh, it just works!

 Unfortunately, because it doesn’t need any drivers, you can’t program the keys to do what you want them to do, and the blank screen key doesn’t work. You can download the shareware program USB Overdrive to re-map the keys to do anything you want.   The side view shows volume buttons.  the ATI wonder remote is still better as a remote control for the DVD player  and itunes applications, as it has more buttons, but this Logitech unit is more reliable and simpler.

TO MAKE A PRESENTATION WITH NO SOUNDTRACK…
(eg song words for church, a slideshow that plays in the background at a birthday etc)

1. Get a macintosh, don’t waste time with a PC. Don’t use powerpoint unless you want to waste a lot of your time.

2. For a presentation that has plain slides and maybe 1 or two movies, keynote is good. It comes as part of iwork from Apple.

3. If you need to use lots of multimedia, or last minute flexibility to make changes, then ‘see’ may be better. (‘see’ is available from rwts.com.au – sign up for beta version under products – see)

TO MAKE A MOVIE WITH A SOUNDTRACK
(eg a video clip for a song)
To make a movie with words (stills) and pictures AND a soundtrack.

- imovie is easier than keynote, as the timings are MUCH easier, even if the final output is not as pretty (but you probably won’t notice the difference on the big screen)

• make all the lyrics as slides with keynote. Do it at 1024×768 resolution – set in inspector – document- slide size.
export from keynote as export-images-tiff.
• drag all these slides into imovie
• drag other stills (eg pictures) into imovie
• drag the song (music) into imovie timeline along the bottom.
• drag all the stills down to the timeline, they will be default to 5 seconds each.
• add transitions (eg select all then add transition cross dissolve)
• finally, starting at first still, listen to song, work out where still is meant to end, double click the still, change the duration of the still so that it ends where it is meant to. Do this progresively for all the stills.
• export as full quality.