QuickAdvice: Turn Your iPad Into A Professional Teleprompter With Best Prompter Pro
Best Prompter Pro ($3.99) by Smartphoneware is an app that turns your iPad into your own personal teleprompter.
Are you someone that needs to give speeches in front of others fairly regularly? Or do you do a podcast? Or do you just want your own teleprompter for some reason? Whatever the reason may be, there is an app for that. And what batter way to utilize that big screen of your iPad?
Best Prompter Pro just arrived in the App Store a few days ago, and for the most part, it provides a pleasant experience for delivering those scripts you need to read.
The first thing you'll need to do when you open Best Prompter Pro is to create your script. Be it a speech or podcast script or just your part in a presentaton - just start typing it out. This process can be made much easier if you use an external keyboard with your iPad (Bluetooth or the Apple Keyboard Dock), though it's not impossible with your iPad's own touch keyboard (just a bit harder to do).
You can format your text with different fonts, sizes, colors, and even use headers and other format options, such as bold, italic, underline, and bulleted lists. All the formatting is done by BBCode text formatting. When editing, it will appear in BBCode, but when you hide the keyboard, the script will be formatted and turn into a WYSIWYG view.
When you finally have your script ready to go, that's when the app turns into a full on portable teleprompter! Your script will appear formatted and ready to go. But this isn't just a note app where your text stays still on the screen.
At the top there will be a blue tab that shows how much time has elapsed. The middle of the bottom menu bar will have a Play button, which will start scrolling the text to the the top. You can reset the timer too, with the reset button. The number in the middle represents how fast the script will scroll. The smaller the number, the slower it will move.
Additionally, you can record yourself reading the script from within the app. The record button is tucked away in the bottom left corner. Doing the recordings will help you hear how you are doing and help you perfect your speech. If you record multiple recordings, you can access them via the button in the bottom right corner when the Record menu is active.
Markers can be added on the script to help you control your pace of reading aloud. Font size can be increased or decreased as you wish, and you can change the text to all caps and even invert colors for easier reading. If a mirror is used to help you read scripts before, then don't worry - Best Prompter Pro even has a Mirror Mode, that flips the text so it can be read fine in the mirror.
When you're viewing all your scripts from the main screen, you can navigate between them with the arrow buttons, email it (attached as a .txt and audio files), edit, or delete them. You can sort your scripts by date or alphabetically, and even search through them if you've got a bunch to go through.
For the most part, Best Prompter Pro works great. The only thing I would like to see in the future is Dropbox support or something that involves cloud syncing, because what if someone has their scripts on their computer? There isn't an easy way to get it into Best Prompter Pro directly, and BPP seems to save these scripts as .txt files anyway. It would make sense to include something like Dropbox support.
Other than that, Best Prompter Pro is pretty good if you are in need of a teleprompter for your needs. At $3.99, it is also half off until February 28, so you need it, now's the perfect time to grab it.
