© 4-18-03 Dr. Neale Monks

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• Product Name: Keynote 1.0.1
• Company: Apple Computer
• URL: http://www.apple.com/keynote
• Category: Presentation Software
• Price: $99 ($79 for educators)
• Requirements: G3 or G4 Power Macintosh running OS X 10.2
• Rating: 4 bounces - Pure Lust

Microsoft PowerPoint has been the only show in town as far as professional presentation software is concerned on both Mac and Windows platforms for years. I've been using the program more or less continuously for ten years now, although the oldest version I own, Mac version 2.1, is from 1990. Back then Microsoft programs came in red and white boxes with thick hardbound manuals. For all its limitations that version is probably the nicest I've yet used; simple, very intuitive and still capable of producing nice presentations. Later versions have been increasingly over-burdened with features that few people need and when employed clumsily can make a presentation look amateurish. That's been the Achilles' heel of PowerPoint: the more powerful the program gets, the worse the average presentation has becomes.

To be memorable and effective, presentations should be simple, but Microsoft is in the business of selling upgraded software every couple of years, and that means offering new features. Heck, really good speeches don't need slides at all. Can you imagine Winston Churchill telling the world that "we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender" all the while pointing at pictures of beaches, fields and streets? Inept public speakers on the other hand just love to wallow in a morass of visual aids all psychedelically coloured and densely worded. After all, it is so much easier to press a mouse button and watch things whoosh across a screen than it is to say something in an entertaining way. Invariably, there is negative correlation between the complexity of the PowerPoint slides and the effort and polish put into what the speaker actually says. Somewhere between the master of rhetoric and the meatball in a cheap suit are the people who can combine a natural speaking style with compelling graphics, and at this no one is better than the CEO of Apple himself, Steve Jobs. Steve's Keynote Addresses are the centrepieces of any Mac expo or event, but he doesn't use PowerPoint. And here's the news. It's Christmas morning, and Uncle Steve's left something special in your stocking to play with: Keynote 1.0.

Apple Makes Me Offer I Couldn't Refuse

I'll admit it. I got Keynote only because it was on special. I already had the OS X version of PowerPoint at my disposal, not to mention the rather anaemic presentation module in AppleWorks. So I didn't really need yet another presentation program. But during February and March, Apple offered teachers and faculty iLife and Keynote together for $14.95. Compared with the Apple Store price for Keynote alone, $99, that's a steal. A week later and Keynote arrives, together with the various iLife applications that, apart from iTunes, I don't use much, if at all.

Installation and Requirements

Installing Keynote is a breeze and follows the usual process that we've all gotten used to with OS X applications. Once installed, there is just the one file, the actual application "package", and unlike PowerPoint you won't find a folder full of templates and clipart here. The default themes are hidden away inside the Keynote package and can't be accessed, but if you want to install additional third party or self-made themes, you need to put them elsewhere. The place for them is in a folder called "Themes" inside the Keynote folder inside Library: Application Support; note that this is Library folder at the top of the hard drive and not in your Home folder. Curiously, this Themes folder doesn't exist by default; you need to make it yourself. Hardly difficult, but it isn't mentioned anywhere in the installation program or the Help file. A second oddity is when running updaters; these expect to find Keynote at the top level of the Applications directory. This does seem pretty common with many OS X applications, particularly Apple's own ones, and can be annoying if you have a lot of applications and like to file them away in folders within the main Applications directory.

Keynote has fairly tough requirements, not least of which is the fact it won't work on anything less than OS X Jaguar. It needs a fairly fast G3 or G4 (500 MHz recommended) with 8 MB of video RAM and 1 GB of hard disk space to spare. Otherwise Keynote is pretty much what we expect from an OS X application: it's stable, attractive and takes full advantage of the mind-blowing graphics tools like Quartz, OpenGL and QuickTime included in the operating system. Expect crisp, anti-aliased text with automatic ligatures where fonts support them and high-resolution graphics that you can rotate and resize on the fly without a pixel out of place.

Pictures and Charts

Like PowerPoint, Keynote includes various tools for drawing simple diagrams like arrows and flow charts, but unlike PowerPoint the objects produced are vector not bitmap objects. This means they can be resized and rotated without them becoming jagged. You can also add things like shadows of any colour, colour blends or change the blurriness, gradients and opacity of the objects. Every time you discover a new tool in the Properties palette you'll find yourself saying, "Wow!" - it really is that good. In comparison PowerPoint seems crude and limited being stuck with the bitmap graphics modelling toolbox it had in 1990.

When it comes to importing and using graphics files, Keynote again raises the standard right up to where it should be with OS X Jaguar. You can place PICT, GIF, TIFF and JPEG graphics files onto slides, as well as PDF and QuickTime movie files. Because it's PDF aware you can import things like charts from Excel simply by printing them as PDFs and then importing them into your presentation. Of course this will be a graphics file and not a spreadsheet, so you can't edit the data or expect macros to work, but if you want to display a carefully formatted Excel spreadsheet this is a very useful trick. A boon to graphics power users is the fact that alpha-channel graphics are supported, allowing you to include images with complex edges, cutouts and transparency. Want to import pictures straight from iPhoto? No problem; open iPhoto and drag and drop the image from the photo library onto the slide where you want it.

On the other hand, Keynote handles charts in a similar sort of way to PowerPoint, with a "dummy" chart appearing on the slide, and its spreadsheet in a new window allowing the user to edit as required. Tables use a similar sort of approach, but are for more powerful than PowerPoint ones in terms of their ability to handle high-resolution graphics. Images can be scaled or stretched to fill the cells in a table, and a wealth of subtle but effective animations can be used, for example to make the contents of the appear one at a time. If you've seen any recent Apple Expo presentations, you'll be familiar with how Steve makes the Apple product line-up appear one at a time: iMac, iBook, PowerBook and PowerMac. You can do that now, too.

Elegant Simplicity

Compared with PowerPoint, manipulating the text on objects in a slide is much simpler because almost every setting can be accessed from just one palette, the properties palette (the most notable exception being a text palette used for changing fonts, point sizes, etc.). Many of the features on this palette will be familiar; such as those on the "build" tab that controls whether text appears all at once or a line at a time, for example. Instead of reams of clip-art and zany fonts, Keynote comes with twelve (count 'em, just twelve) themes; but they're good ones. Each is classy, sophisticated and finely crafted to get the best out of the text and graphics. Of course PowerPoint comes with dozens of themes, many of which are perfectly serviceable, but with Keynote there's none of those nasty themes we've all seen like that particularly nasty yellow sans-serif font on a dark blue stripy background one. If nothing else, Keynote will help you start off right with an upmarket, attractive theme.

All the tools we've mentioned, and many more besides, all fall into place once you start assembling your presentation. There are dynamic guides that help you centre objects on slides, and a nifty navigator view within which you can arrange slides hierarchically, so that you can hide subsets of slides if you need to. It all feels very intuitive and natural, and Keynote is one of the easiest applications to learn to use that I've come across.

Giving Presentations

A key difference between Keynote and PowerPoint is that whereas Keynote is optimised for on-screen or an LCD projector presentation, PowerPoint easily produces 35 mm slides as well. If you give classes or presentations at venues with only a 35 mm slide projector available, then this is an essential feature and something you're going to miss if you switch to Keynote. The workaround is to export the Keynote presentation as a PDF files, open that in a PostScript-savvy graphics application like Photoshop, and then edit and develop your Keynote slides one at a time as you would an ordinary graphics file. Just don't forget to have the PDF files rasterized at 300 dpi or more if you don't want jaggy text and graphics!

A great selling point of Keynote is its ability to read and write PowerPoint-formatted files. Being able to open PowerPoint files is probably essential because most people's existing presentations will be PowerPoint files; exporting to the PowerPoint format is really only going to be an issue if you collaborate with others who don't have Keynote. How well does all this work? In most regards very well, but there are limitations. The most noticeable problems are with high-resolution graphics files; these are downgraded markedly when the presentation is converted to PowerPoint format, sometimes so badly as to be unusable. In that case you'll need to insert the original graphics file and annotate or edit accordingly. Lower quality graphics formats like JPEGs are usually fine, as is text, but nevertheless all users will want to check the exported PowerPoint format files to see how they look rather than just assume they're okay. The bottom line is that if you need to produce files for a PowerPoint using audience, then at the very least you're going to need to run the files through PowerPoint even if you create them in Keynote, which does mean you'll need two applications and not just one. This rather kills the idea that Keynote can be used as a complete replacement for PowerPoint.

Besides PowerPoint formatted files, Keynote exports presentations to Adobe Acrobat PDF files and to QuickTime movies. Both these tools work well and could be useful in certain situations. PDFs are ideal for distribution on the Internet, while QuickTime movies can allow you to share high-resolution, animate versions of your presentations with Mac and Windows users who don't have Keynote (or PowerPoint, for that matter). Admittedly, to use full screen mode you will need to use QuickTime Pro to "present" the movie, or Mac users can create an AppleScript application to force QuickTime player into this mode, thus:

on open fileName
tell application "QuickTime Player"
activate
open fileName
present movie scale normal
end tell
end open

Finally, Keynote supports AppleWorks presentations, so if you've been using that application to develop your presentations up until now, you'll have no problems integrating them anything you do in Keynote. Note that this doesn't work in the other direction, AppleWorks won't open a Keynote presentation.

Conclusion (or as Steve would say, "One more thing...")

So will Keynote turn you into a clone of that black shirt and blue jeans wearing presentation guru we all know and love? Probably not by itself, no, but what it will do is redefine the approach many of us take to presentations. Keynote has stripped presentations down to the essentials, basically text, graphics, and slide transitions, and then used the OS X engine to optimise them in way PowerPoint simply cannot match. Instead of cheap-looking clip art and stupid whooshing sounds, Keynote users will be crafting anti-aliased text with automatic ligatures and importing high-resolution alpha-channel graphics straight from Photoshop. Throw in the charts and the versatile export options, and Keynote has to a winner.

Of course there are little niggles. Keynote is a demanding application and needs a fast Mac, despite its apparent simplicity. At times it feels a tiny bit slower than PowerPoint. Exporting to PowerPoint isn't flawless, so if you need to swap presentations with PowerPoint users, be sure and look over the exported files carefully. But these issues aside, Keynote blows PowerPoint out of the water. If you value style over gimmicks, and you don't need perfect integration with a PowerPoint using team, then Keynote is the OS X presentation application of choice.

- Dr. Neale Monks

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