So, we've been working pretty much non-stop for the past week on Presentation Remote and Presentation Manager updates.

Presentation Manager is the Mac application that you use to authorise an iPhone or iPod Touch to control your presentations. Being a Mac app, we can update this more-or-less whenever we like, which is why there have been a handful of releases since launch, offering faster response and bugfixes in each one. The current version is Presentation Manager 1.2.4, which offers a new Wireless Signal Test as well as an assortment of fixes.

On the other hand, updates to the iPhone application have to be approved by Apple. As you may have read elsewhere, this hasn't been working out so well for everyone.

Hopefully, this will get sorted out soon, because we have a big update to Presentation Remote and we want to get it into your hands as soon as possible.

We're calling it Presentation Remote 1.3 so that it matches up with Presentation Manager 1.3, which we'll release just afterwards — we hope it'll be less confusing if they have matching version numbers!

(Updated 2008-07-30: Presentation Remote 1.3 is now available in the App Store, and you can auto-update to Presentation Manager 1.3 by clicking "Check for updates..." inside your current version of Presentation Manager.)

Here's what will be included:

• You can now use Presentation Remote to pick which slide the presentation will begin on.
• You can also skip to any slide while giving a presentation — a new "Index" button brings up a complete list of your slides, and you can tap it to jump straight there.
• You can adjust the size of the notes text from the new Settings menu.
• There's an optional presentation timer, if you want to keep an eye on how long you've been talking for.
• The presentation browser shows filenames as well as titles.
• The presentation browser warns you if your presentation has unsaved changes. You should always save before beginning a presentation — Presentation Manager needs to read the file on disk.
• CPU use is optimised even more.
• There are some bugfixes too. Some of the more notable ones:
• Currently, if there's a "build" on the final slide of a presentation, you can't step through it from Presentation Remote. This is fixed in Presentation Remote 1.3.
• Currently, if you have slides marked "Skipped" in Keynote, this confuses Presentation Remote. This is fixed in 1.3 (this will require both Presentation Remote 1.3 and Presentation Manager 1.3 to fix).
• It will be easier to "flick" to move from slide to slide — at the moment, you have to "pull" slides quite a long way over (more than half-way across the scren) to change slides.

Note that you can upgrade to this immediately it's available, because it will work fine with Presentation Manager 1.2.x.

But don't upgrade to Presentation Manager 1.3 until you have Presentation Remote 1.3 safely installed on your iPhone/iPod — Presentation Manager 1.3 requires the new version of Presentation Remote. That's why we're waiting for the new Presentation Remote to be released on the App Store first, so it shouldn't really affect anyone, but just so you know.