# Keynote 2



## mindbend (Mar 14, 2005)

After prepping an important presentation for a client in PowerPoint, I came to the realization that it just wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be. PowerPoint is just too limiting and too low quality in everything it does.

So I went out on a limb and proposed having the client let me redo it in Keynote and they could just use my iBook to present it. Once I showed them a couple of transitions in Keynote, their decision was easy. They let me do it.


The Good:
Keynote's transitions and animations are glass. So smooth and silky, they destroy PowerPoint at its best.

Imports Photoshop and Illustrator files complete with transparency and vector info. Wow! I was able to do some gorgeous layouts thanks to this.

I really like how Keynote is organized for editing. The sidebar panel of thumbs is great. Same for the inspector pallette. You can get to where you want far easier than PPT.

You can animate multiple elements at the same time without grouping them. Nice!

Very easy method of using Master pages.

The selection of objects is how is should be, unlike PPT. If you marquee select some objects, you only have to marquee a portion of the object to select it. In PPT, you have to select the whole dang thing. Very annoying. Also, in Keynote slecting an individual object is a lot easier than PPT, which does this annoying thing on text boxes where you have to select it twice in effect.

True transparency. Nuff said.

You can select multiple objects and change all of their heights, for example, in the inspector. So if you have a bunch of shapes that you want to be 35 pixels tall, no prob. You can force it to maintain propotions, too. Nice.

Smart guides, so you can quickly tell when objects are aligned. Love it.

The Bad:
You can't resize a group of objects. This is very bad! If you need to resize a group, you have to break it apart and resize the pieces individually. Argh!

End file sizes can be larger than PowerPoint equivalents. (But who cares, they're so much better!)

You can't change fonts with the Text inspector, which seems odd. You have to bring up the separate Show Fonts menu. Kind of kills the point of the text inspector, which would be a lot easier.

Summary:

Keynote may not be able to do quite as much as PPT, but it does what it does so much better, that 90% of the time you won't care.

I'd like to see them add slightly more ambitious animation options (like following a path for example).

Also, Apple should really consider making some kind of Keynote player for Windows (and I don't mean just using Quicktime).

In short, Keynote is WAY better than PowerPoint for making nice looking presentations. In and of itself, Keynote is very good with room for improvement. I was able to work about five times faster in Keynote than PPT once I got the hang of it.


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## powermac (Mar 15, 2005)

Great review of Keynote. I agree with every point. I use it exclusively  for presentations, and find it a great tool. Of course, keeping with Apple's traditional view of sensational, I use the transitions. Many people, after my presentations ask, "how did you get power point to do that." I laugh and say, "don't use power point."


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## andyhargreaves (Mar 25, 2005)

Hi Guys

Just started using Keynote, and am similarly impressed.  The only thing I can think of to comment on is that one of the transitions I expected to be there is missing.  The one I mean is the one which is like a liquid trickling away through the page, as used in the Apple preview movie of the iWork suite  (no, not the "droplet" transition).  I'm not sure why I was expecting to be able to do this (perhaps it was that movie?) but I was a bit disappointed.  Never mind - it's great all the same.

Andy


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## baldprof (Mar 25, 2005)

I have used Keynote occaisionally for two months now. I agree with the reviewers comments. I generally like it.

The presentations can be converted to Powerpoint when they have to be run on a Windows machine or a Mac which has Office installed. This can work smoothly if you are careful about your font choices.There will of course be some changes to the animation effects and the transitions, so be sure to view the exported file in PowerPoint before you present. 
*But most important:* Some really weird stuff can happen if the machine on which you run the presentation does not have the same fonts as the machine on which you created the presentation, especially if the presenting machine runs Windows. 
My recommendation:if you know the presentation will be shown on a Windows PC, use only the most widely available fonts, i.e. the ones which come with Office. You may find this limiting, but you'll save yourself a lot of grief.


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## andyhargreaves (Mar 25, 2005)

True enough.  I have found (in my limited experience) that the best way to show presentations in Windows is by exporting them to Quicktime.  Ignoring the huge file sizes, this works really well and ensures your presentations look as stunning as you intended.

Now, all this becomes immaterial when I get round to robbing a bank and buying a PowerBook!

Andy


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## aquamacus (Mar 28, 2005)

So does anyone know of a good way to show these presentations full-screen if exported to Quicktime?  I know you can do it if you have Quicktime Pro, but anyone know of another way?


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## mindbend (Mar 28, 2005)

Do a search at versiontracker.com for "movie player". There should be a bunch of options, many of which play quicktime movies at full screen.


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## TangentIdea (Mar 29, 2005)

I've been using Keynote for the past couple of weeks, and I've fallen in love with it. It's certainly more simplified than PowerPoint, but I consider this a strength, not a weakness. PowerPoint's design layout is more open-ended, allowing you more design and animation options, but this discourages good consistent design. Furthermore, it's more difficult to use, and it takes longer to create even a simple outline presentation. Keynote makes it easy.

Keynote's file conversion from PowerPoint is pretty good, but not flawless. However, I haven't noticed any significant bugs other than a little bit of unpredictable rendering of text and text builds. Even when the exact same font is installed on the Mac as the PC running PPT, text blocks won't always wrap at exactly the same places, leaving words "dangling," running off the screen, or just not appearing where they were supposed to. In one case, the PC displayed a font as oblique by default, and the Mac displayed it as regular, by default. Sometimes text builds do not perform as expected, as well. All of those problems can be somewhat easily fixed with some manual tweaking, however.


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## TangentIdea (Mar 29, 2005)

aquamacus said:
			
		

> So does anyone know of a good way to show these presentations full-screen if exported to Quicktime?  I know you can do it if you have Quicktime Pro, but anyone know of another way?



VLC Media Player, or RealPlayer. Both support full-screen QuickTime on primary or secondary screens. VLC can be configured to default to playing full-screen on the secondary screen.


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## Decado (Mar 30, 2005)

i mainly use Playlist Player (and VLC for more "complex" codecs).
i think Playlist Player is pretty and all (great for watching saved television series). the only thing i find lacking is the poor forward/rewind functionality.


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## Durbrow (Mar 30, 2005)

Anyone using Keynote 2 on a 400 mhz G4? Also, I heard that not all transitions are available for G4's running at 1 gig speed.


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## TangentIdea (Mar 30, 2005)

Durbrow said:
			
		

> Anyone using Keynote 2 on a 400 mhz G4? Also, I heard that not all transitions are available for G4's running at 1 gig speed.



I think the transition performance depends more on your video card than the computer itself, since Keynote unloads a lot of that processing on to the card via OpenGL. I'm running Keynote 2 on an 800mhz G4 PowerMac with a 32mb Radeon 9600 card and a 32mb Rage128 card for a second display. The Rage128 is noticeably worse than the Radeon -- I'll be replacing it. The transitions aren't really as much of a problem as the advanced text builds.

Be advised that you can overclock your ATI video cards using ATIccelerator II.


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## mindbend (Apr 2, 2005)

FWIW, I run Keynote on an 800MHZ G4 iBook and it runs quite well. Most of the transitions and text effects are glass. It can't run a handful of effects, but they're grayed out so it's not like you have to worry about them performing at half rate.

One area that takes a hit is video. If I try to put too high quality of video (high frame rate and quality settings or a demanding codec) in a keynote presentation, the iBook will choke it through. On our 17" PowerBook everything is stellar.

Without doing any true investigating, it seems like Keynote sort of pre-caches slides. If you page through really fast, the effects and such will take a hit and can't keep up, but if you have a more leisurely pace even the iBook does very well.


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