[OS X TeX] preferred tool for presentations

[Maarten Sneep]

On 19-dec-2006, at 23:51, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 19 déc. 06 à 22:48, Herbert Schulz a écrit :
>
>> Very nice! Did you use Mathematica for the graphs or were they  
>> generated some other way?
>
> Thinking a bit more, actually at the conference where this talk was  
> presented I made an observation which was kind of heart-warming.

[snip]

> Then on the first day of the conference I started to see people  
> popping up MacBook Pros here and there. They still had to convert  
> their talks to PowerPoint, and then when played on the Windows PCs  
> the converted presentation wouldn't play the embedded movies  
> (explanation from experience: PowerPoint Mac embeds movies using  
> QuickTime containers, and PowerPoint Windows doesn't recognize  
> these containers; you have instead to re-embed the movies one by  
> one in PowerPoint on a Windows PC). Thus either the movies weren't  
> played at all, and they were played quitting PowerPoint and  
> launching a media player.

I just returned from the AGU. I think that about 1/3 to 1/2, perhaps  
even more of the laptops present there were macintoshes of varying  
vintage (TiBook, white iBook to shiny 17" MacBook Pro). The  
resentations could either be prepares in PowerPoint, KeyNote, or PDF.  
and in all presentation rooms there was a PC _and_ a Mac (a mini, I  
think) for displaying the presentation. All presentations had to be  
uploaded 24 hours in advance to get them on the right computer (no  
messing with USB sticks, no messing with connecting other systems to  
the projector. This made for very smooth conference sessions, timed  
such tat you could jump between talks to other sessions to see what's  
on there. The AGU fall meeting (in San Francisco) is also pretty big:  
Moscone West + part of Moscone South, with some 13000 attendands.  
Interesting to experience once, but it is hard to find someone.

> I realized, then, how widespread the Mac is becoming again, at  
> least in the academic word and mostly in the US. At this  
> conference, among the laptops bought by attendees, Macs seemed to  
> rule, with PCs being the exception; a couple of years ago it was  
> just the opposite.

That is what I observed in San Francisco.

> The same trend hasn't reached the same proportion in France I  
> think, but I can feel it coming. It was kind of heart-warming, to  
> get some kind of gratification for all these years sticking to the  
> Mac while almost everybody else around was saying or implying it  
> was snobbism and a waste of taxpayers' money to purchase expensive  
> and slow Macs instead of cheaper and faster PCs.
>
> Maybe even one day we'll be able to make presentations in Keynote  
> directly, instead of having to convert them beforehand to PDF or  
> PowerPoint!

Switch fields, come to the AGU ;-)

Maarten


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