I give a fair number of talks, and I’m still hesitant on buying and carrying a physical clicker.
I usually connect my laptop directly to the display rather than sharing a PDF file prior to a presentation. So I spend the talk tethered to the keyboard which is inconvenient in some settings.
What kept bothering me is that I'm never actually without a remote. There's a phone in my pocket and a watch on my wrist and neither of them can advance a slide. A whole category of dedicated hardware exists to do
a thing the devices I already own should obviously be able to do.
The Apple Watch Keynote app actually can do the thing but I almost never use Keynote. Figma Slides and Google Slides are my main drivers so I’ve created ClickerRemote.
It's actually three small apps: a macOS menu bar app that receives commands and injects the keystrokes into whatever presentation software is frontmost, an iPhone remote, and an Apple Watch app. The Mac and the phone find each other over
MultipeerConnectivity. No pairing screen, no account, no cloud, they just see each other on the local network and the watch relays through the phone.
The watch is the part I actually wanted. On stage you don't want to be looking at a screen at all, so navigation is a gesture: a double tap, or a flick of the wrist, moves you forward. I added a "no going back" toggle too, because the failure mode of gesture control is the
accidental trigger, and during a presentation a wrong move forward is survivable in a way that jumping backward isn't. The phone stays in the project as the comfortable option. A big up/down layout and a presentation timer is there when a gesture feels like too much.