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OSCPoint FAQ

Is there a version for macOS? Will there ever be?

Note

The answer is basically no - read more below if you want to find out why.

OSCPoint works by hooking into the PowerPoint Object Model - a VBA & C# interface that's part of Office on Windows. You can explore this here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/overview/powerpoint/object-model

However, it also uses a bunch of platform-specific features that aren't available on macOS

Here's a (slightly tidied up) analysis from CoPilot:

Key Issues for macOS Compatibility:

  1. VSTO Technology: OSCPoint is a VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) add-in and requires the Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime, which is Windows-only
  2. COM Interop: OSCPoint Uses Microsoft.Office.Interop.PowerPoint for direct COM interaction with PowerPoint, which is not available on macOS
  3. .NET Framework 4.7.2: OSCPoint is built on .NET Framework (Windows-only), not .NET Core/.NET 5+

Other platform-specific features:

  • Windows Forms dependencies (System.Windows.Forms)
  • Windows-specific registry and file system access patterns
  • COM-based ribbon customization (IRibbonExtensibility)

Other considerations:

  • A macOS version would have different code-signing requirements - maybe a new code signing certificate would be required?

I'm not saying that it's impossible to write a tool similar to OSCPoint for PowerPoint on macOS - just that's it's a whole new challenge I'm not interested in investigating.

If someone else wants to give it a go, they're welcome to use the same OSC schema as OSCPoint - this would mean the Companion module would work with both.