Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Thursday, February 20, 2003

Reviewing Apple Keynote 1.0 -- Comment()
I had the Keynote 1.0 application on loan from Apple for a couple of weeks. I was moderately impressed, and wrote a review for an IT magazine in Finland. Here are some of the things I learned:

The user interface of Keynote is well thought out, and quite powerful.
There should be more themes available (or easy-to-use tools to generate themes with customized elements).
Some features are missing, for example cropping of bitmap figures.
Import of PowerPoint files is not faultless, but mostly works well, with small need for manual correction.
Import of multi-page PDF documents would be a good feature to have.
Importing and exporting to the OpenOffice Impress format would be a good addition.
Exported files (PDF, PowerPoint, QuickTime) are usually huge, mainly because Keynote is not compressing the figures.
It is possible to directly edit the XML file format of Keynote (or to generate a presentation programmatically).
The figures included in a presentation are inside the "bundle" directory of the presentation. Thus the figures are easy to edit outside the Keynote application.
Keynote runs well on a 1 GHz PowerBook G4, but less powerful machines may have problems in running the application smoothly.
The price is about right, compared to PowerPoint.
Keynote is not really an alternative to PowerPoint, because it is only available for Mac OS X. If you need an alternative to PowerPoint, consider the Impress program of OpenOffice.

I hope Apple continues to develop Keynote, and corrects the weak points. I haven't used Keynote extensively in my work yet, but I did decide to buy a copy of the application. A 20-slide presentation made in PowerPoint was relatively easy to "polish" in Keynote, and it now looks much nicer than in PowerPoint. The fancy 3D transitions between slides are perhaps a bit too much for some viewers, though.

Girlfriend stops reading breakup letter at page 20 -- Comment()
News Is Free: Popular Items points to Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20:

Claire Thompson, author David Foster Wallace's girlfriend of two years, stopped reading his 67-page breakup letter at page 20, she admitted Monday. [...] "It was pretty good, I guess, but I just couldn't get all the way through," said Thompson, 32, who was given the seven-chapter, heavily footnoted "Dear John" missive on Feb. 3. "I always meant to pick it up again, but then I got busy and, oh, I don't know. He's talented, but his letters can sometimes get a little self-indulgent."

-- Comment()
John Robb writes: "If we are going into a war that will cost hundreds of billions over the next couple of years, does anybody object to the the crass way Bush is allowing the wealthy in America to avoid paying for the war? I think it is amazingly underhanded. Not only do the wealthy in America NOT fight in American wars (a volunteer army shields them from this), under the Bush formula, they won't pay for them either." [The Aardvark Speaks]

Snow In NYC -- Comment()
n3rd.net writes: "Yes that is Times Square. Credit goes to The Sun for the picture." I used to compete in cross-country skiing, so this picture warms my mind. ;-)

Finland Tops Rankings in IT Report -- Comment()
Global Information Technology Report 2002-2003 is now available: "The Report is the most comprehensive, cross-country assessment of the state of information technology, covering 82 economies around the world."

Here are the Top 10 rankings:

Country

Score

Ranking

Finland
5.92

1

United States
5.79

2

Singapore
5.74

3

Sweden
5.58

4

Iceland
5.51

5

Canada
5.44
6

United Kingdom
5.35

7

Denmark
5.33

8

Taiwan
5.31

9

Germany
5.29

10