C6 Top Mac Apps 2007: Presentation

Whether you’re a designer or a software engineer or in some area between the hemispheres of the brain, there are multitudes of reasons why you would want to make a clear and professional presentation, be it a screencast, a software manual, or a quick mockup for a client. These are a few of my favorite tools for making presentations that impress without breaking too much of a sweat. I’m saving online tools until a later part of this series, so the cool online slideshow and PowerPoint replacements are going to wait a bit…

Presentation

iShowU is far and away the best screen capture program I’ve found. It provides a good range of presets and allows for great flexibility in quality and size settings. In combination with mouseposé (covered below) and Stomp (a companion program), it provides a screencasting power punch, whether you’re doing a quick demo of a back end for a long distance client’s website or trying to sell your latest software ;).

From shinywhitebox
Price $20 ($42 w/stomp)

Mousepose fills in a shortcoming with many screen recording packages. It allows you to “spotlight” the mouse, turned on and off via hotkey. I’ve made the mistake of jiggling the mouse to show where it is during a screencast and I can tell you, this is far more elegant. The spotlight on the mouse can be adjusted as a preset or live with hotkeys, and it can optionally offer a visual cue for clicks and double clicks. It also offers the option of displaying keystrokes in an overlay, or displaying only keystrokes with modifier keys.

From Boinx Software
Price $14.95

VisualHub is just plain necessary if you work with video. From simple tasks like putting my latest project on my iPod to converting and compressing Quicktime movies into formats friendlier to programs like Vegas on a PC, it gets used frequently.

From Techspansion
Price $23.32

ScreenSteps is a recent discovery of mine. I’ve always thought there should be an easy way to put together step-by-step guides for screen based activities. Screensteps is a little pricy for what it does, in my opinion, but when I consider the time it saves me and how impressed clients are to have a customized instruction booklet, it pays for itself. With features ranging from a sturdy spell checker to the ability to work with external screen capture utilities (or its own with built in editor/highlighter), it does a very good job of putting together documentation for any screen based project.

From Blue Mango Learning Systems
Price $39.95

EasyCrop is far and away my favorite screen capture utility. It has the usual gamut of standard screen capture features (marquee, window, screen, delayed screen), but has excellent tools for zooming, cropping, resizing, sharpening and finally dragging to any destination, whether that be Photoshop for further editing or straight to Mail or a folder.

From Yellow Mug
Price $11.95

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