Kensington is a leader in desktop and mobile device accessories. Over the past 5 years, Mercury helped Kensington with the development of several products such as Kensington Charger, Proximo® Bluetooth® Tracker, and Alarm Tag, PresentAir™, and more.
As part of this partnership, we have developed a range of mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows phone that used Bluetooth Low Energy to control and communicate with Kensington smart accessories.
The One of the hardest challenges was Kensington PresentAir™
PresentAir™ is a slick bluetooth remote that helps mobile users run slide presentations and control office apps on their tablet similar to how it’s done with a conventional slide clicker on a PC.
The timing was crucial - the software had to be ready in time for the product launch. As a result, Mercury successfully completed a range of iOS, Android, and Windows apps in just several weeks.
“PresentAir™ was designed to give users expanded flexibility for presentation delivery with the next generation of computing devices, as well as unparalleled customization capabilities that give users more control over how they use the presenter to be as productive as possible.”
The team was facing 3 challenges
When Kensington started working on their mobile accessories in 2013, Bluetooth Low Energy was an extremely young technology and very few companies had sufficient skills in it. At this point, Mercury had already proven its proficiency developing Kensington Proximo for Samsung® Galaxy S4 devices, which used BLE communications over a proprietary SDK from Samsung® one year before BLE support became officially available in Android.
Another challenge was that the product targeted a wide range of devices, so Mercury had to leverage its multi-platform experience and deliver the solution that worked for Windows, iOS and Android. Integrating BLE on different platforms required significant development efforts, considering specific platform characteristics and limitations. On top of everything - all this had to be done over a very short timeframe.
PresenterWorks™ apps
Mercury has developed a range of lightweight, responsive and easy-to-use PresenterWorks™ apps that helped users pair their mobile device/desktop computer with Kensington PresentAir via BLE and configure buttons on the remote control to trigger different functions in 3rd party apps.
As a unique feature, the apps let the user set up and save a number of configuration profiles, each tailored to a specific app or purpose. So the device can quickly switch from being a media player remote to a slide clicker, scroller, or a simplistic keyboard, just with a press of a button.
“PresentAir is an excellent product for a variety of uses, and I have found myself using it frequently over the past two years.”
See Also
Kensington Proximo
Barco
Bladepad
