Beamer Notes is a two-screen presenter for slide decks made with LaTeX Beamer and “show notes on second screen”. Your iPad shows the current slide, your private speaker notes, and a preview of what’s next — while the projector shows only the slide, cleanly letterboxed on black.
Draw with Apple Pencil and every stroke appears on the projector in real time, in exactly the right place. Fingers are free to turn pages, so your palm never leaves a mark.
YOUR IPHONE AS A REMOTE
Step away from the lectern. Your iPhone shows your speaker notes, the next slide and the timer, turns pages, and aims the laser pointer on the projector. It pairs straight to your iPad — no shared Wi-Fi, no account, nothing to set up.
AND A MAC FOR THE TIDYING UP
Beamer Notes on the Mac keeps your library in order between talks — folders, colours, renaming, sorting, on a big screen with a keyboard. Everything stays in step with your iPad over iCloud. Presenting remains the iPad’s job.
FEATURES
• Dual screen over HDMI or AirPlay — the audience sees only the slide, never your notes or controls.
• Apple Pencil ink with live mirroring, through the system drawing palette: pen, monoline, fountain pen, pencil and marker; a pixel eraser and an object eraser; lasso to move what you have already drawn; a ruler for straight lines; any colour, any width. Plus a laser pointer with an optional comet trail.
• Tabs — keep several decks open at once, drag to reorder, and they reopen where you left off.
• Speaker notes shown full-width with pinch-to-zoom, plus a next-slide preview.
• Automatic layout detection for notes on the right, left, top, or bottom — 16:9 and 4:3 — with a manual override when you need it.
• Count-up timer and an adjustable countdown with an on-screen “time’s up” alert only you can see.
• Navigate by tap, swipe, on-screen arrows, hardware keyboard, USB or Bluetooth presenter clickers, or your iPhone.
• Tappable table-of-contents and \hyperlink jumps inside the PDF.
• Thumbnail overview that marks the pages you’ve annotated.
• An in-app library with coloured folders, synced through iCloud and organisable on your Mac; import via Files, AirDrop, or the share sheet. Plain PDFs work too.
• Decks are fetched to the device in the background, so they open with no network at all — and anything not yet downloaded is marked in the library.
• Your ink is saved automatically and survives quitting the app.
Built for lecture-hall reliability. No account, no tracking, no data collection.
Free to try with three of your own PDFs. The built-in tutorials are always free, and reopening a deck you have already used never counts again. Need more? Add ten or thirty decks whenever you like, or unlock unlimited decks forever with a single purchase.
TIP FOR PROJECTORS
Connect the display before you begin and stay in Beamer Notes for the talk. On iPadOS 26 and 27 the system sometimes does not hand the external screen back to an app that has been in the background; if the projector starts mirroring your iPad, quit Beamer Notes and open it again with the display connected.
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