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.

-- Comment()
The Scobleizer Weblog writes: "The Mac world is pointing to me because I predicted Apple is gonna ship some new hardware this year that'll be as fast or faster than current state-of-the-art Intel stuff." Here are two links:

Arstechnica's "Perpetual Future Apple CPU Thread."
MacRumors: "Apple Desktops Outperforming Intel?"