About Lantern

• What is Lantern?

  Lantern is a presentation program for OS X, born out of a desire to allow anyone to quickly and flexibly present content.

• How did it come about?

  While Lantern is masterminded by Radartech, there are also a variety of beta testers who have contributed to the project over the years. We are a team of people who work with digital presentations on a regular basis, and know what features we want to see to make our lives easier. Lantern is the way that we get those features.

• Tell me some of the key features.
  • Need to show songs in a church service?
    Lantern can split up songs into verses by looking at the line gaps. Lantern can rearrange and edit verses during the singing of the song, and it allows for temporary changes to the song as well, so that this week's music group doesn't get to dictate what everyone does for months afterward.
  • Need to play movies?
    Lantern can do that natively. What if Lantern can't play the movie? You have the option of telling Lantern to take control of QuickTime through the power of AppleScript, so that if you have an application like Perrian installed, you can still show your short clip.
  • Need to display text slides quickly?
    Most basic functions in Lantern can be accomplished purely through the keyboard, so you don't have to spend precious seconds dashing about with the mouse. Press 'T' to open a text window, type your message, and press 'Command-T' to throw your message up on the screen. It genuinely could not be simpler.
• How can I get a copy?

  For the moment, joining our beta program is free, in which you will receive a copy that is registered to work for the next year.

  If the beta program progresses well, we are hoping to release a paid version in the near future.

• How does this relate to 'See'?

  See is another presentation program that serves as a spiritual predecessor to Lantern. It was great, but lacked a few key features. While Lantern was started to try and fill that gap. Fast forward through time, and See is sadly no longer maintained, and Lantern has been tasked with picking up where it left off.

• I found this cool feature in your program. I love it, but why did you even think to put that in there?

  We really do get asked this question, or some variation of it.

  The answer is that we're not some random group who've never actually operated in these situations. We're individuals who present content to audiences on a weekly basis.

  For the last few years, fresh perspectives to the task at hand, a range of technical levels of experience, and a variety of different situations have been invaluable to making Lantern the tool to solve the job.

• I want your program to be able to show Youtube videos!

  So do we.

  However, downloading Youtube videos violates their Terms of Service. Perhaps we could add a feature to allow you to stream Youtube videos, but if your Internet connection drops out partway through, then your presentation has suddenly become less than professional.

  If you think that streaming would, in fact, suit you fine, please contact us to say that you would like this feature! Your feedback could help to make this a better program for everyone.