joaoflux / digital / analog / culture

I am one of the organizers of the Berlin Pecha Kucha Night. We noticed more than a year ago, that teh software we use for the presentations (Apple Keynote) is not very precise when it comes to intervals. Not only is 20 sec interval usually longer than 20 seconds, but the longer a presentation runs, the bigger the difference gets. We hoped the new version of Keynote would solve the problem but hasn’t.

That is why I am looking for other solutions. We also don’t need a heavy application as Keynote, since we are really just showing series of .jpg files.

One program that is designed to do exactly that is Apimac Slide Show. Apimac offers a couple of nice consumer oriented software for Macs. Apimac Slide Show has one nice feature: one can add a soundtrack and export slideshows as standalone players for Mac OS X and Windows (Linux Systems are not supported :().

Since the file size of such a standalone player is much smaller than that of a movie while providing a much superior quality I am tempted to offer standalone players of all presentations for download instead of movies. Unfortunately this would mean that we would not be able to offer a podcast feed any longer, because doing both would be too much work (we don’t make money with Pecha Kucha).

Anyway, when I first tested Apimac Slide Show it seemed to be able to keep the 20 sec pace. My latest tests, however, show that it has the same problem as Apple Keynote!! Ever since playing around with my C64 and Sinclaire Spectrum, I thought that counting seconds with computers is precise enough everyday use, if you don’t happen to be a scientist in particle physics.

Unlike Keynote Apimac Slide Show does not let you set the interval to 19.2 secs or something like that. There is only a select menu that gives you 16 different interval settings ranging from one second to one minute.

Anyway, here is an Apimac Slideshow standalone player for Mac OS X of a Pecha Kucha presentation I did via Skype:
PK_Akl04_JoachimStein.dmg