I enjoy giving presentations to people. Often, my presentations involve live demos with one or multiple applications. When I switch between these applications and the slides, my (cluttered) desktop always shows to the audience, and it can include application windows to other contents I don’t intend to let my audience see. Also, the switching process can make a disrupted experience for some audiences. So I thought I should improve my presentation setup and experience in some way. Inspired by various video conferencing software's Screen Sharing feature and Presenter Mode created by Professor Ben Jones for his lecture, I made a solution to address these issues - preZENter.

The main goal of preZENter is simple: let my audience see the content I want them to see, without any distraction elements on the screen. Also, it ensures the non-disruptive transition between slides and applications, keeping the audience focused.

preZENter has a Control Panel, allowing me to choose the content I want my audience to see: slides, single application window, and video capture device (I use a video capture card that connects to my other laptop for most of the time). preZENter also has a Live Window, which presents the content I choose in the Control Panel, one at a time. Once I picked the content I want my audience to see, the Live Window will show the content I just picked, and the actions are in real time.

The setup is quick and straightforward. I just treat the projector/screen as an external display during first-time setup, instead of mirroring my Mac. Then, I make the Live Window full screen and drag it to the external display. Typically (if no external devices are involved), within 10 seconds, I'm done with the setup, and my presentation is ready to go.

By the time I wrote this article, the only function that preZENter has is presenting a single application window or video capture device. However, I think more functionalities can be added to elevate my presentation experience. So in some future versions, new useful features are expected. But I have to get out of this tough semester in order to work on further development.