How to present like Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs has been called a “master showman” whose “reality distortion field” lulls observers into believing they desperately need whatever he’s pitching. However, it isn’t magic that makes him so engaging, but a talent for public speaking combined with ruthless rehearsals.

Still, one need not be a visionary billionaire vegan to deliver a killer presentation. yoZi has written a great article about steps you can take to bring your own talks up to that level. Tips include, “Try for an unforgettable moment,” “Demonstrate enthusiasm” and my favorite, “Create visual slides.” From the article:

“There is a trend in public speaking to paint a picture for audiences by creating more visual graphics. Inspiring presenters are short on bullet points and big on graphics.”

Amen. We all know that slide presentations are an exquisite form of torture, made worse when the presenter is simply reading slide after slide of text. Unless we’re in a foreign language class, please abandon the read-a-long.

There is one more thing yoZi failed to mention: Have a few catch phrases ready to go. See above.

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New Keynote Motion Themes from iPresentee

If you’re bored silly with the typical theme backgrounds in Keynote, pop on over to iPresentee’s website and check out Keynote Motion Themes 2.0. These themes, which were released today (7/7/08), add five more motion themes to iPresentee’s product line.

All of these themes provide moving backgrounds to catch the eyes of your audience. The five themes — Money, Curtain, Rain, Story, and Exercise Book — include 14 or more master slide layouts each.

Motion Themes 2.0 is available online for $25, or you can purchase individual motion themes for $10 each. And by the way, the free Keynote Objects icons are still available on the iPresentee site.

[via prMac]

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Free Stuff: Keynote Objects

iPresentee, a small company providing themes and objects for Apple’s iLife and iWeb software suites, is offering a free download of Keynote Objects.

Keynote Objects is a package of 100 attractive icon-like objects that can be used not only with Keynote, but also with Microsoft PowerPoint and Word. All of the objects have a transparent background, and are easily resized, rotated, made more or less transparent, or shadowed.

I’m actually going to use several of the objects as icons for a new web site that I’m designing, simply because they offer an attractive and cohesive set of art objects. What will you use your free Keynote Objects for? Read

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Found Footage: Apple WWDC Keynote in 60 seconds

Here at apple.cooone.com HQ we find ourselves watching Mahalo Daily almost everyday. Mahalo has this new thing they do with conferences and special broadcasts where they trim down the video to 60 seconds. So for the folks that don’t wish to sit through the almost 2 hour WWDC keynote can just watch a 60 second clip that shows the main points of the keynote.

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Apple posts video of WWDC 2008 keynote

Apple has posted video of Steve Jobs’ keynote presentation this morning. The video is available via QuickTime, and covers all the announcements of the iPhone 3G, the App Store, MobileMe, and more.

Thanks, Omer!

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