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OSCPoint FAQ

Is there a version for macOS? Will there ever be?

Note

The answer is basically no - read more below if you want to find out why.

OSCPoint works by hooking into the PowerPoint Object Model - a VBA & C# interface that's part of Office on Windows. You can explore this here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/overview/powerpoint/object-model

However, it also uses a bunch of platform-specific features that aren't available on macOS

Here's a (slightly tidied up) analysis from CoPilot:

Key Issues for macOS Compatibility:

  1. VSTO Technology: OSCPoint is a VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) add-in and requires the Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime, which is Windows-only
  2. COM Interop: OSCPoint Uses Microsoft.Office.Interop.PowerPoint for direct COM interaction with PowerPoint, which is not available on macOS
  3. .NET Framework 4.7.2: OSCPoint is built on .NET Framework (Windows-only), not .NET Core/.NET 5+

Other platform-specific features:

  • Windows Forms dependencies (System.Windows.Forms)
  • Windows-specific registry and file system access patterns
  • COM-based ribbon customization (IRibbonExtensibility)

Other considerations:

  • A macOS version would have different code-signing requirements - maybe a new code signing certificate would be required?

I'm not saying that it's impossible to write a tool similar to OSCPoint for PowerPoint on macOS - just that's it's a whole new challenge I'm not interested in investigating.

If someone else wants to give it a go, they're welcome to use the same OSC schema as OSCPoint - this would mean the Companion module would work with both.

Can I control Presenter View?

The PowerPoint Object Model is surprisingly quiet when it comes to Presenter View. In particular, I've not found any way to:

  • Switch in/out of presenter view
  • Control the presenter view clock
  • Control the split between current slide/next slide/notes
  • Control the notes text size
  • Scroll the notes

Some of these actions could be performed using keyboard emulation - and there's several tools on the market that could help with this.

As these actions cannot be performed natively, OSCPoint is not going to support them.

Note

Think you've found a way to do this without keyboard emulation? Great! Let me know - I'd be interested to find out more.