Once again, Apple has released a new major update to their iPhone / iPad operating system: iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. I’ll just call it i(Pad)OS 14 from now on. And, once again, there is one issue that I’m seeing with the existing version of Projector when running on i(Pad)OS 14.
First of all, it seems (to me) that Apple’s Quick Look gets worse and worse at converting PowerPoint whenever they update their OS. This new version is no exception to that pattern. I’m seeing some text in one of my test PowerPoint files not convert properly – most likely due to font changes made by Apple. So, if you want to update to i(Pad)OS 14 and make use of the in-app PowerPoint conversion, beware.
The good news is that you can always convert your PowerPoint files to images, ZIP them, and upload that ZIP file to Planning Center to use instead of the native .ppt / .pptx files and you will have no issues whatsoever. This article gives details on that procedure:
So far, I’ve only run across that one issue (in-app PowerPoint conversion), but there has always been a solid workaround for that since day 1. So, other than that, i(Pad)OS 14 is looking pretty good with Projector 2020!
The bad (future) news is that Apple will discontinue the mechanism that I use in Projector to access the Quick Look PowerPoint image conversions at the end of 2020 – they will no longer allow Projector updates into the App Store that use that ‘deprecated API’ – so stay tuned for (possibly sad) news later this year regarding the in-app PowerPoint conversion feature.
In the mean time – also stay tuned for exciting new “feature news” for Projector coming up in the next few months!