Presentation remotes

[Ned Batchelder]

I have a presentation remote (handheld doo-hickey for advancing through
slides in a presentation). It works by sending keystrokes that
Powerpoint likes for those functions. Unfortunately, bruce doesn't
interpret the keys the same way.

It sends Page-Down for next slide, and Page-Up for previous slide, which
bruce oddly interprets as "skip by 5 slides". I can hack bruce to
interpret them differently, but I don't know if Richard has a better
idea of how he'd like to incorporate the functionality.

BTW, much less important to me, but something to take into account, are
the other two buttons on the remote, and this may be typical of others.
First, the remote also has a "blank screen" button which sends a period
("."). In full-screen mode, Powerpoint blanks the screen to black on
that key. Second, there's the "F5/esc" key, which *alternates* between
sending F5 and sending Escape. There's probably not much useful that
can be done with that...

--Ned.

--
Ned Batchelder, http://nedbatchelder.com

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 9:53 PM, Ned Batchelder <n...@nedbatchelder.com> wrote:
> It sends Page-Down for next slide, and Page-Up for previous slide, which
> bruce oddly interprets as "skip by 5 slides".

You say "oddly" I say "conveniently" :)

I'm not at all attached to that behavior though, so would be open to
having it changed.

> BTW, much less important to me, but something to take into account, are
> the other two buttons on the remote, and this may be typical of others.
> First, the remote also has a "blank screen" button which sends a period
> ("."). In full-screen mode, Powerpoint blanks the screen to black on
> that key.

That could be handy.

> Second, there's the "F5/esc" key, which *alternates* between
> sending F5 and sending Escape. There's probably not much useful that
> can be done with that...

What does that do in Powerpoint? Doesn't esc exit the presentation?
And F5 ... I don't know what that does.

Richard

[Ned Batchelder]

Richard Jones wrote:

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 9:53 PM, Ned Batchelder <n...@nedbatchelder.com> wrote:
  

It sends Page-Down for next slide, and Page-Up for previous slide, which
bruce oddly interprets as "skip by 5 slides".
    

You say "oddly" I say "conveniently" :)

I'm not at all attached to that behavior though, so would be open to
having it changed.
  

Presentation remotes all seems to use PgUp and PgDn to advance the slides, so it would be great to re-map these.  Maybe Ctrl-PgUp could skip 5?

BTW, much less important to me, but something to take into account, are
the other two buttons on the remote, and this may be typical of others.
First, the remote also has a "blank screen" button which sends a period
(".").  In full-screen mode, Powerpoint blanks the screen to black on
that key.
    

That could be handy.

  

 Second, there's the "F5/esc" key, which *alternates* between
sending F5 and sending Escape.  There's probably not much useful that
can be done with that...
    

What does that do in Powerpoint? Doesn't esc exit the presentation?
And F5 ... I don't know what that does.
  

F5 launches the slide show full-screen.  This key therefore toggles you in and out of the slide show.  I'm not sure why that's useful.  After exiting the slide show, you either have to get over to the computer to use it for something else, or hit F5 to go back into the slide show.  It's like my DVD player that had an eject button on the remote control.  What's the point?  After hitting the button, you have to get off the couch and go to the player anyway to get the disc...

     Richard