by Jason Snell
Sandwich floats into presentations with Hovercraft
Adam Lisagor introduces his new Mac app, Hovercraft:
With Hovercraft, you stay on camera. Your slide sits next to you, big and legible. You reach up, pinch it, move it where you want it. You never stop talking. No clicker. No option-tab. No moment where you lose the room.
It’s a virtual camera (so, compatible with pretty much any videoconferencing app) in which case your slide deck (a PDF) is a movable object within the frame. You use hand gestures to position it and shrink it. It hovers—hence the name— in front of you, and you can also use keyboard shortcuts or hand gestures to toggle it on or off or send it full screen.
What I like about this is that it’s using the camera system rather than requiring screen-sharing modes that sometimes just mess up what you’re trying to do. In my brief testing I struggled to get the hand gestures right, but I would imagine that in time—I can only aspire to be as laid back as Adam is in his video demo—I will get the hang of it. This will be a nice addition to my user-group Zoom presentation arsenal.