Presentation Commander — Client
A presenter for the stage laptop
What it does
The presentation-laptop half of Presentation Commander. It's a presentation engine rather than a capture tool: it opens the deck itself, so Program and Next Slide go out as two clean NDI streams instead of a scraped screen.
On macOS it can also drive a Keynote slideshow that's already open, over AppleScript, instead of a pre-exported PDF, and PowerPoint the same way on macOS and Windows. Navigation works both ways, so when the presenter uses their own clicker, the UI follows.
- Bespoke PDF engine with Now and Next rendered locally via pdf.js
- Internal PDF links — a contents page, a "back to agenda" button — stay clickable and jump to the right page
- Keynote on macOS: slide count and presenter notes pulled on open, navigation two-way with the real slideshow
- PowerPoint on macOS and Windows, plus Google Slides and Canva
- Dual NDI out: Program and Next Slide as separate senders
- OSC control, with a Bitfocus Companion module
- Nine slide transitions on Program Out for PDF sources — the presenter view keeps cutting, so the operator is never watching an animation instead of the truth
Where it stands
Field testing, released at v1.3.1, a dependency release. v1.3.0 added a transition direction that follows the way you're moving through the deck (from the left when advancing, from the right when stepping back) and renders JPEG 2000 images instead of dropping them. The video tour is the app itself presenting a PDF, driven over its own OSC control surface, running on its own rather than paired to a server. The system has since been tested in a lab, but not on a live event.
Watch it running
Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play.Watch it there instead