In the Conference Room

[mathogre]

The Mac pleasure point has once again been stimulated.

At work we have a bunch of conference rooms that have video capabilities. Connect your machine to a projector and display on a large screen. It's funny watching people do it with their laptops, struggling actually. While this equipment was designed with the PC in mind, the setup never seems to work very easily. On one of my projects, it would be useful for me to be able to use the projection capability. While I can get a laptop for this purpose (my normal work machine is a tower), I thought it might be even easier to do this with my MacBook.

Yesterday I went to the Apple store to get a video converter for my MacBook, mini-DVI to VGA. Today I brought my MB to the office. (Yes, I work Saturdays. I have a 6 floor building to myself. ^_^) I brought it into a conference room, fully expecting to encounter all manner of garbage. Would it work at all? What about the display resolution (projector is 1024x768, MB is 1280x800)? If I could get it to project, would I still see everything on my MB screen or would it go blank? Would I need to reboot the MB to make it work? Would this take 1 hour or 2 to figure out how to make this work?

I started the MB and started the conference room projector. I then plugged the video cable into the MB, along with an audio cable. Before I could even be prepared for the worst, the best happened. The MB screen resized and rescaled according to the projector. The screen image appeared on the projection screen in the proper aspect ratio. It was great!

I opened the application I need to be able to project. It worked just fine. I took out the MB remote and fired up FrontRow. I played a stored trailer. It worked great! I changed the wallpaper from a complete black background to an inside shot of the 5th Ave. Apple store.

I considered this a success.

Next I unplugged the video cable from my MB. The screen returned to its normal self, though it was back to its black background. Piqued, I reconnected the video cable to find the MB had kept the "projector" desktop as I'd left it, as an entity separate from the normal desktop.

The Mac pleasure point had once again been stimulated. This was So Easy.

 

[Brown Study]

The Mac pleasure point had once again been stimulated. This was So Easy.

Be quiet! Everybody will want one!

 

[MacHeadCase]

LOL

Great see how well it went, mathogre.

 

[mathogre]

You know what's funnier still? When I went to the Apple store yesterday at lunch, who should be there but MY BOSS?! (2nd level, department head) Seems he just got an iMac a week ago. ^_^

 

[MacHeadCase]

Well, well, well... Looks like you'll have great Mac discussions at work with that boss of yours. :girl:

 

[Stretch]

I used my iBook for a presentation a few times when I had it during college. It made it so much easier than transfering everything over to the prof's laptop, and hoping formatting stayed the same.

 

[Audio.Trench]

That's awesome.. I had my iBook shipped to my mom's place just to make things easier for me. So when I picked it up yesterday, I was showing her all the cool stuff built into the OS like fast-user switching and the rippling effect in the dashboard, and she was like "Wow, I wish that was my laptop!"

 

[caribiner23]

The Mac is certainly a pleasure when it comes to this stuff.

For what it's worth, I had an IBM ThinkPad that was just as easy to connect to multiple displays-- a testament to IBM's attention to this detail. Too bad many of the other Windows systems aren't quite as easy to deal with.

 

[iKitten]

Congratulations, mathogre! Thanks for sharing the 'love.' :flower:

 

[cwa107]

You know what's funnier still? When I went to the Apple store yesterday at lunch, who should be there but MY BOSS?! (2nd level, department head) Seems he just got an iMac a week ago. ^_^

Interesting to see this thread, as I had a similar experience, but not quite as smooth.

We had just installed a new Polycom VSX 7000-series video teleconferencing system that has a VGA interface for using PCs to display content.

During a demo of the unit for executives and their assistants, I thought it would be cool to show off my MacBook Pro which came with the aforementioned SVGA-DVI adapter.

I couldn't get the MBP to throw out any signal to the VTC system. I thought maybe there was a toggle switch similar to what I'd seen on Dell machines. It took me a few minutes before I resorted to going into System Preferences and choosing "Detect Displays". I got it to send video out, but it instantly scaled both my internal display and the external display to 800x600 (absolutely the lowest resolution), which was odd because the external display is an HDTV 46" plasma capable of 720p at the minimum.

I guess I was expecting that at the very least it would leave the internal display at the current resolution and throw out a least common denominator resolution to the VTC.

It wasn't a big deal, but it certainly didn't show the MacBook as I had hoped - and fumbling through System Preferences to get it to work in the first place was not exactly awe-inspiring.

Let's hope the next time I go to do this, it's with an LCD projector that provides DDE information (I think this was the root cause of my problem and not necessarily the MBP). It's encouraging to hear about your experience since mine was a bit embarrassing at the time.

At the very least, I learned one crucial lesson that day - always rehearse for you presentation beforehand to avoid pitfalls like this in front of an audience.

 

[mathogre]

Thank you everyone! ^_^

And cwa107, you're right about rehearsing. Today's effort was done to avoid doing that very thing. Never never never dry run in public, especially to people you want to impress. I didn't want anyone around today when I did it. Best of luck to you next time! -_^

 

[technologist]

It's always great when you have successive presentations in the same room.

Once I was second in line to give a presentation. First guy took ten minutes to get his laptop (Sony? Toshiba?) running XP to connect to to the projector.

Room full of programmers, by the way. Four of them working together finally managed to get the desired presentation on the projector.

After he's done, I walk up with my PowerBook and plug it in. Cross my arms and watch it expectantly. It takes about ten seconds to recognize the projector and display the presentation.

The crowd was quite impressed.

 

[mathogre]

technologist++

Thumbs up for the big win! ^_^

 

[chrisiw]

Hi Guys
Just into my first MacBook three weeks ago, and for me, it all "just seems to work" and so easy, and this thread again seems to confirm how great Mac is.
(Ex XP convert.)

Chris