Sandwich Introduces Hovercraft for mac

Adam Lisagor of Sandwich has announced a new macOS app called Hovercraft.

The app, $19 for one Mac and $29 for two, uses hand gestures to control one’s slide decks during video presentations. There are keyboard shortcuts too, but the app’s raison d’être is it “hovers” around you as you speak, easily accessible via gestures.

“Pick Hovercraft as your camera in Zoom or wherever. Reach up, pinch the air, pull the window where you want it,” reads Hovercraft’s pitch on its website. “Your face stays on camera. The slide sits next to it. No screen share. No option-tab. No corner thumbnail.”

I discovered Hovercraft by way of this Jason Snell linked item on Six Colors. I find it really interesting because the gesture-based interaction model portends well for accessibility. Granted, it’s been eons since last I gave a presentation—in person, no less—but that doesn’t undercut the broader point here. Presuming one is able to learn and perform the gestures in the first place, to use one’s hands to move through a slide deck and reposition the window can remove a lot of friction with heightened cognitive load and excess clicking, etc. It can be difficult to cognitively stay on task and manage the “backend” of a presentation whilst also remembering salient talking points, not to mention using a mouse or trackpad or clicker to cycle through the slide deck itself and make sure screen-sharing is behaving itself. For people with certain disabilities, to do all this work in real-time may well be the technological equivalent of climbing Everest or Kilimanjaro; thus, Hovercraft could be a lifeline in successfully reaching the summit.

Overall, Hovercraft strikes me as highly evocative of Vision Pro’s gestures, not to mention the head gestures on AirPods Pro. As someone who quickly acclimated to visionOS I imagine learning Hovercraft wouldn’t be difficult. Lisagor and team ought to be commended not only for the damn clever name, but for the idea of using gestures.