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Mini-review: Keynote presentation software Reviews
I received my copies of Keynote and Final Cut Express today. I haven't had any time to look at FCPExpress yet (other than to note that the 750 page manual comes only as a PDF), I spent a couple hours playing around with Keynote tonight, and thought I'd write a brief review of the program (oddly enough, Keynote does include a 100-page printed manual that does a great job of explaining the program).

As a summary, I'll just say that I can't see going back to PowerPoint again ... read the rest of the article for some of the details on why not.

The first thing I noticed about Keynote is that it doesn't feel like a "version 1.0" application. The interface is polished, and every time I thought "Geez, it'd be useful if it did something like this," I found out that it could, indeed, do something like that. It seems Steve was providing excellent feedback during his one-year beta test!

Nice touches abound, from the alignment guides that pop into view when one object gets closely aligned (vertical or horizontal) with another, to the slide view that supports indenting and collapsing views of sub-slides, to the ability to open more than one inspector window, to the great collection of photographic-quality included artwork (though more would be nice).

I spent about 45 minutes converting a recent PowerPoint presentation to Keynote format. About one minute of that time was required to actually convert the presentation; the other 44 were me playing around with nicer transitions, graphics, fonts, and transparency!

Keynote seamlessly handles audio, video, graphics, and text, and it has an incredibly intuitive interface. Once you've used the slide navigation panel on the left, you'll wonder how you ever used the old-fashioned slide sorter in PowerPoint. The charts and graphs are top notch, and the included transitions rendered quickly and added a degree of professionalism you just can't get in the Microsoft offering.

Keynote runs a bit slowly on my G3/500 iBook, and very nicely on the G4/733. About the only time I noticed a slow-down was when working with a lot of text on one slide; it was slow to activate the selection, but then plenty fast when typing and/or editing.

The interface isn't perfect, but it's very well done and quite easy to use. The included printed manual explained the program's features thoroughly, including how to create customized themes and master slides. There's even an included sample presentation that shows additional tips and tricks.

The exports to QuickTime looked and performed great, capturing even the advanced transitions with a good level of detail. They take a few minutes to export (probably about 10 to 15 seconds a slide), but the final product is worth the wait. I did not try exporting to PowerPoint or PDF.

I had a number of presentations and sample libraries open, and was cutting and pasting back and forth quite often during the two hours I spent with the program tonight. Not once did I have a crash or unexplained glitch, which is quite impressive for a first release in today's environment.

Limitations? I wish it had a method of inserting a soundtrack across all the slides, and the handling of music clips within a slide isn't quite as precise as I might have liked. But that's about all I can come up with on the shortfalls list.

Overall, I'm quite happy with my $99 investment in Keynote, and can't wait to see what new features future versions bring...
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  • Currently 2.69 / 5
  You rated: 3 / 5 (26 votes cast)
 
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Agree -- it's very good
Authored by: swilcox on Jan 11, '03 02:43:47AM

I received my copy of Keynote today too ($79 from Apple Education Store). I agree with this review. I'm very pleased with my initial testing; Powerpoint is dead for me. Keynote produces gorgeous looking shows. The transitions (especially the cube) are stunning. I can see that it will be easy to create my own master slides. The integration of alpha channels for making frames around photos or movies is just downright slick. I use lots of QuickTime movies in my shows, and I wish there was a way to specify that a movie will not play until I click it (movies play when the slide comes up, or when they appear on the slide). I imported some graphics from OmniGraffle (saved as PDF) and they look great and resize great in Keynote.



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Agree -- it's very good
Authored by: kb5ql on Jan 11, '03 02:51:32AM

Played with the application at the Expo. The exports to PowerPoint work as advertised. It's hilarious seeing the beautiful Keynote presentations back in powerpoint (as in the quality difference). It even converts the transitions well. This is the one thing it has to do well, otherwise, what's the point. Well done for a 1.0.

Now we just need to do testing on the whole export with the various versions of PowerPoint for Windows. Ensuring that the presentations work well on 97 and up is important.



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Agree -- it's very good
Authored by: torture4 on Jan 11, '03 06:20:29AM

I'd REALLY like to know how Keynote exports to PowerPoint.

I'll bet a lot of the features like alpha transparency, fonts, transitions, rotations, etc. get lost when brought back into PPT... I agree that Keynote's probably going to become a great presentation tool for the Mac, but there are times when you're doing to have to send over an presentation to some poor Windoze user, who only has PPT.

What's the verdict?



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Agree -- it's very good
Authored by: tomem on Jan 11, '03 08:27:53AM

How about sending them a PDF or a QT if you have movies. Good enough for seeing content.

The one benefit of having Claris as an independent software shop was that we often got Wintel versions of things. If that starts happening again, I suppose the XonIntel rumors will really take off.



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Agree -- it's very good
Authored by: fabrizio on Jan 11, '03 03:11:01PM

Swilcox, if you want your movie won't play until you click, use the "Build" inspector and set a "Build in" style for the movie.



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Agree -- it's very good
Authored by: swilcox on Jan 11, '03 05:45:52PM

Thanks Fabrizio!



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File format
Authored by: alunapr on Jan 11, '03 07:10:09AM

I also was very excited when I saw this. I would be very happy to dump PP, but others in my company use windoze, so I am relieved that they have put both import and export there, as well as pdf. If I write the whole thing, I would export as pdf, which is what we use for presentation at the moment anyway, but for collaborating I need the import/export.

There is one other question, though: what is the file format? I thought I saw a suggestion that it was XML-based? One problem with powerpoint for distributed development is that it would go into a Perforce repository, and this works best for text documents, since it need only store the diffs, and it is easy to see what the differences are if two people make changes at the same time. With a binary format, such as ppt or pdf, you can't do that.



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File format
Authored by: hagbard on Jan 11, '03 07:47:08AM

check on http://www.macslash.org/, someone posted what he found about the file format:
http://macmerc.com/
(I found the link on macslash which deserves being quoted)



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LaTeX pdf Used?
Authored by: herbs on Jan 11, '03 09:41:46AM

Howdy,

Does anyone know if pdf presentation slides produced by pdflatex
can be read in and manipulated while retaining the the embedded
fonts and equations?

If so, I'll get Keynote tomorrow!

Good Luck,
Herb Schulz



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LaTeX pdf Used?
Authored by: Colleague on Jan 12, '03 07:34:13AM

I've tried to insert equation from latex into keynote. And it was cool!
I just create equation using latex and pdf latex or ps2pdf. and a simple drag and drop
works. but the size of the inserted object is always the size defined by your dvips or ps2pdf. that means that if you don't care about that, you will insert A4 or Letter pdf in your presentation. I've planned to write a little gui to manage that, but i don't have a lot of time for that actually.

One last thing. Doing so, you will also use the font embedded in your pdf. That means that it can be any fonts used in texmf, even if it is not defined in macosX



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LaTeX pdf Used?
Authored by: herbs on Jan 12, '03 07:40:57PM

Howdy,

Ooooooo, now I know I've got to get Keynote!!!!

Thanks for the info.

Good Luck,
Herb Schulz



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LaTeX pdf Used?
Authored by: sim240vac on Jan 12, '03 09:23:33PM

Somebody beat you to it - search Google for "Equation Service"... :-).



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LaTeX pdf Used?
Authored by: Colleague on Jan 16, '03 07:01:25AM

It is good to know...
thanks!



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LaTeX pdf Used?
Authored by: sim240vac on Jan 20, '03 10:36:04PM

After having played with Keynote (and Equation Service) a little now - I like it. I like it a lot. It probably doesn't do everything that powerpoint does, but it seems much more intuitive to use, and I think it does everything I'll ever need. It seems much better than going the "completely PDF / give presentations in Acrobat" route that some people are taking.

A tip: with Equation Service, unselect "use color" in the preferences, and then simply drag and drop the typeset equation (which is a small pdf) into Keynote. Then you can have nice typeset latex equations sitting on top of your "themed" presentation. I'm using Letterpress - my boss will cringe, he's a strictly white backgrounds man...



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Yes, it's a Powerpoint killer!
Authored by: mm2270 on Jan 11, '03 09:58:38AM

I got my copy of Keynote on Thursday of this week too. Been playing with it quite a bit, and I agree with the whole review, most especially with the few limitations mentioned. I can't understand why they don't allow an audio track to go across the whole presentation. Powerpoint is limited in the same respect- one udio track per slide, which really sucks. I provided feedback to Appel already on that point, I hope anyone else who wants that feature, or others will do the same.



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Why one audio track?
Authored by: chabig on Jan 11, '03 10:57:14AM

I see two reasons you might want one audio track to span an entire presentation...

1. As background music: You can already do this. Just play music in iTunes in the background.
2. For a self running slideshow: Export the slides to Quicktime and put the audio in over there. Then just run the slideshow full screen in Quicktime Player. Looped if you want a continuous program.

Otherwise, for a presentation where you manually advance slides, it's better to have separate audio on each slide.

Of course, both of the continuous audio "hints" I mentioned are workarounds. I think we'll see a single track in a future version. But for now, it's still possible to do what you want.

Chris



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Major omissions in Keynote
Authored by: Mononoke on Jan 11, '03 11:20:08AM

Where's the timing? In PP, I can set the timing for each individual event separately: Timing between slides can be different for every slide; Timing between events on each slide can be different for each event.

Exporting to Quicktime doesn't cut it: There is only one choice for inter-slide timing and for inter-event timing. Plus, exporting is the only way to have a looping show. Once imported to Quicktime, transitions become stuttering 12-frame-per-second animations, instead of the smooth Quartz animations you get playing the show in Keynote. Not nearly as cool.

What if I want to end on a blank slide? I guess I'll have to create one of my own.

Not enough different keys advance the slideshow. In PP there are at least a half-dozen keys that will advance the show, including Enter and Return. Remember, some of us are creating shows for our bosses, and we don't want to have to retrain them on this.

Cool app thus far, but it'll need quite a bit more before it can replace PP.



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QuickTime frame rates
Authored by: tilt on Jan 11, '03 08:04:04PM

You can change the FPS in QuickTime export. It defaults to 12, but you can change that in the custom options.

Pick "custom" from the list of formats, and then pick "Settings...", and then you can change the frame rate.



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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: Mitchell on Jan 11, '03 03:41:57PM
Although Keynote has a lot to like about transitions and handling images with transparency and the like, I found using it when my copy arrived yesterday to be ultimately a frustrating experience.

1: The graphing module does not permit you to graph one variable against another. In other words, it isn't possible to plot a simple equation, x vs. y. It's adorable when the x axis values are all equally spaced, or they're just labels, but there isn't even the equivalent of what MS Office would call a "scatter" chart. This makes the product crippled for engineering use.

Half the time, I create graphs in Excel and just paste them as pictures in PowerPoint anyway. Still, since you can't edit the line and legend styles anymore when you do this, as you can in PowerPoint, it's not as helpful.

2: Mastering works funny. The term "master" is used a little differently in Keynote, and means more like what the term "Slide Layout" means in PowerPoint. That's fine.. I didn't expect the terminology to be compatible completely. But what is a nuisance is the frames for photos in the masters don't actually seem to bear any relationship to the photos you import. It's almost as if the embossed frame in the Letterpress theme, for example, was just a few pixels on the background graphic rather than some feature I could snap a photo to, or resize to fit a photo, or something.

In PowerPoint, you can use Insert - > Picture -> From File... with a photo placeholder selected, and it will insert the picture right where you want it, and size it properly. Then, in the formatting palette, you can make changes to opacity, size, borders, and so forth. If I insert a photo in keynote, it shows up at full size, which is often larger than the entire presentation.

Another deviation with mastering vs. layout is the treatment of text and graphics. If I reapply a slide layout in PowerPoint, using the menu or a toolbar button, it changes the sizes of the text boxes for title and bullet points and the positions of the picture and graph elements to their defaults, which I can change on the slide master. But if I try the same thing in Keynote, it also resets the colours, fills, and so forth of any graphics.

3. The control of text size is limited to that cocoa text palette thing. I must be the only one around who detests it because I've seen limited complaint about it. But there is no keyboard shortcut nor toolbar button for making text smaller or larger, as PowerPoint provides. When you switch themes, for example, you don't have an easy way of shrinking text or growing it to make the titles and so forth fit in the space allotted for them.

On the whole, I'm predisposed to like Keynote. The transitions are pretty and the themes look pleasant enough. But for serious work, it's not there yet. I might use it for my next big presentation, but the charts will all be created in PowerPoint and Keynote used solely as a slide show application (provided I can get them to import properly..there are some minor issues with the size of text boxes and such causing longish titles to be clipped). If I'd had a day to play with it before buying, I probably wouldn't have.

Mitchell

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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: swilcox on Jan 11, '03 05:52:58PM

" But what is a nuisance is the frames for photos in the masters don't actually seem to bear any relationship to the photos you import. It's almost as if the embossed frame in the Letterpress theme, for example, was just a few pixels on the background graphic rather than some feature I could snap a photo to, or resize to fit a photo, or something."

I think you're not seeing the fact that these photo frames are alpha channel cutouts. The manual explains: drop a photo onto the slide canvase and then send it to the back. The photo frame on the master will act as a mask. You can then resize, move, rotate, set transparency, etc your picture inside the frame.

In fact, I played around a bit in Photoshop today and created my own images with alpha channel cutouts. You can then easily import (save them as TIFFs in PS and use Edit->place in Keynote) them into Keynote to create your own master slide backgrounds. This is very powerful stuff. Apple absolutely got this part right.



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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: Mitchell on Jan 11, '03 07:29:14PM
Yes, I see you're right about that. RTFM, Mitchell.

Any insight about the other two things?

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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: swilcox on Jan 11, '03 10:27:58PM

"RTFM, Mitchell. Any insight about the other two things?"

Ha! I groused about the thin manual when I opened the box, but it's actually pretty good. I see someone else addressed the font issue. I don't know about the chart problems. I rarely use charts. I do use tables a lot though, and the tools that are available there seem pretty good for a v.1.0 product.




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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: Mitchell on Jan 12, '03 12:42:30AM
There is a subtlety to making your own alpha channel masks, though. If you look in the Keynote inspector carefully, some masters have "Image fill" and others have "color fill", with the image placed the way you did it, with Edit --> Place --> Choose...

If you open the Keynote Package, and find your way to Contents --> Resources --> English.lproj --> Themes there are theme files, themselves packages, that you can open. These contain the tiffs which you can use to create your own masks for other photo layouts. Nice to have a consistent starting point.

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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: Scripter12 on Jan 11, '03 09:18:07PM

3. The control of text size is limited to that cocoa text palette thing...

Click on fonts in the Keynote toolbar to get the font tool. At the bottom there is a popup menu. Select Edit Sizes. Click the box that enables the slider, set the limits then click done. Now you can smoothly vary the size of the type to fit the box in Keynote.



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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: dshoskes on Jan 16, '03 11:04:43AM

So far, keynote's not doing it for me either. I use PP exclusively to make medical talks, usually given at meetings or courses. Typically they insist on a .ppt file for the presentation. Since the windoze machine doesn't have the nifty new apple fonts, the results look crappy. The exported file is huge: a 3 slide sample with only text was a 2.4 MB .ppt file.

Admittedly I only glanced at the manual, but changing font and background color was not intuitive. It looks like I will have to make a whole set of themes on my own and that also doesn't look like a simple proposition. I love the idea of a built in chart generator, but without error bars, I will never use it. Finally, I am surprised they didn't include all the powerpoint slide layouts. I particularly need title + 2 side by side bulleted columns.

I certainly want to make this work and to use the nifty and unique transitions to wow the crowd, but it seems as though I will have to work mostly in pp still and then import.



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Keynote and drawing
Authored by: swilcox on Jan 12, '03 07:41:22PM

The drawing tools in keynote are pretty slim. No arcs, for example. And so I resorted to drawing some stuff in OmniGraffle, which is an amazing tool for "smart" drawing of diagrams and such.

I figured the best way to get my graphics into Keynote was to export as PDF. That works just fine: drag the PDF onto the slide. But then I tried just selecting the graphic I had drawn on OmniGraffle and pasting it into Keynote. Guess what -- it works! Transparent background and all. Really snazzy!

So if you're frustrated by the minimal drawing tools in Keynote, take a look at OmniGraffle.



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3 tries - 3 crashes
Authored by: bluehz on Jan 13, '03 11:09:47AM

Three seperate attempts to use Keynote resulted in 3 seperate complete system lockups. Force restart via programmers switch required. One crash during fullscreen playback - would not leave slideshow. Finally got it to attempto draw the screen (e.g. desktop, etc.. but it was all mucked up...windows were all off the screen, then eventually the top 1/2 of teh screen filled with video noise(static). Two other crashes resulted from attempts to export simple 6 slide test to Quicktime (Quicktime 6.0 installed). None of the crashes yielded any sort of crash log or any info regarding crashes.

G4/400 (AGP)
1.2G RAM
Mac OS X 10.2.3



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Quite odd...
Authored by: robg on Jan 13, '03 05:06:35PM

I've done most of those things you've listed without any problems, including multiple QuickTime exports...

Have you tried the usual trick of logging in as another user to see if the problems recur?

-rob.



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