While this isn’t a technical blog, my geekness sometimes kicks in and draws me to a topic that holds my interest. I know that there are at least two of my ten readers who will also find it of interest. The other eight of you may even find it entertaining.

I mentioned how I was using Air Display from the stage during my sermons to control our presentation software, Propresenter, with my iPad and how I was enthralled. It is beyond cool, it gives you a sense of better controlling your visual material that you want to use to make your points in a stronger manner.

However, it is fraught with the potential for mishaps. When it goes bad, it goes bad completely. It is much like jumping out of an airplane with a parachute while the sun is shining, only to have it go pitch black before you’ve pulled the ripcord or checked your altimeter.

Yep. That was my experience this past Sunday.

That sent me scurrying for options. Two possibilities are Jump and Ignition. Both work well in allowing you to control your computer from your iPad and both are very stable. Jump is just a bit more sluggish than I like. It worked fine while I was in Brazil, controlling my office computer through my iPad via the internet. Ignition seems to be more responsive. It is very similar to Go to My PC (which does have an iPad app but has a subscription service attached to it and you must have a subscription for every computer you are using; it additionally hasn’t worked as well on the Mac as it does on the PC, in my experience. But I will be doing some more experience with it). The downside with both of them , just like Air Display, want to be the active app on the iPad. If you multitask, sending them to the background to use an app like Olive Bible Reader (which I strongly recommend), within minutes they are clamoring for your attention or even closing themselves and dropping your wi-fi connection. Once they close, if you are live and in real time, you can forget restarting them and regaining control of the remote computer. At least, you can forget it unless you are capable of being fully present in what you are saying publicly while allowing your brain to be fully engaged with the whole reboot process.

I can’t.

Propresenter has an app for the iPad/iPhone that is a remote control. It seems to be a possibility, especially since it is designed to do one thing only and to do it with the actual software. I don’t know yet if it has the same issue with multitasking that the others do. I will be discovering the answer soon!

I would love to hear from any of you that may have some tech/experience savvy in this. What have been your experiences? What do you use? I know I’m not the only preaching pastor out there who doesn’t have a full tech crew who can do all this for you and let you concentrate only on your speaking.