Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, iWork, Apple
Keynote gets some love
When you think Apple applications you think iLife, Final Cut, Motion, iChat, OS X. Those are the biggies, right? But what about poor little iWork? Well, it looks like iWork, Keynote in particular, is getting some love from the blogosphere. Tim Bray, XML geek and all around cool computer guy, penned a love letter to Keynote the other day. He declared that is it Apple's best app. Daring Fireball agrees that it is good, but probably not the best app Apple offers, while Theocacao lists some of the things that makes Keynote so gosh darned fun to use (anyone ever say that about PowerPoint?).
I must admit that I haven't used Keynote all that much, since I don't find myself giving many presentations (if you would like me to give a presentation just contact me. I'm lonely, and I have a MacBook!). The few times I have found myself whipping something together in Keynote I have been impressed with how such little effort by me resulted in such a great looking presentation.
So, dear TUAWers, any Keynote lovers out there? Let us know in the comments what you like about Keynote, and what Apple should fix in the next version (which I bet will be announced at Macworld '07).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Alex said 1:12PM on 11-10-2006
Khoi Vinh had good things to say about Keynote as well: http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2006/1109_training_key.php
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Ben Babics said 1:17PM on 11-10-2006
I LOVE KEYNOTE!! Although I must admit I never used it for what it's best at... presentations. I used it as a makeshift motion graphics app- since keynote has such great animation effects for transitions and such I found myself using Keynote to make motion graphic intro videos before I learned Motion and After Effects. Then I would simply export the video (presentation) as a Quicktime movie.
I've posted a link to an unfinished intro video I made for my church a while back to see IMO how great keynote is to make animations and such:
http://homepage.mac.com/bbabics/merge/Follow_the_Leader_small.mov
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Jim Hillhouse said 2:15PM on 11-10-2006
I think Keynote is great. As a business app, it is much better than PowerPoint. I have given presentations with annimation, movies, etc. embedded that, along with the very cool transitions, really keep people awake. And I'm excited to hear that Apple is going to continue to enhance Keynote and Pages this coming January.
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MemoryFull said 2:14PM on 11-10-2006
Video with alpha-channel.
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david said 1:46PM on 11-10-2006
I just like the fact that its not PowerPoint. Having an excellent alternative to ppt is great.
An a bigger scale, I would like to see an office suite (ie spreadsheet) from Apple. I used to use Clarisworks back in the day, and that was great for me. I didn't actually start using MS Office until 5 years ago, and I'd like to stop soon. Hehe.
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cecil said 1:48PM on 11-10-2006
I use Keynote every week for Church class I teach. It is fantastically easy and powerful. My list of loves would be too long. My short list of wishes and complaints are easier:
1. Need to edit slides while the show is running.
2. Need to have a better slide browser while show is running. The current one stinks. So small can't tell what's what. One and two areas are where competitors shine.
3. Need a database system to quickly add pre-saved slides, such as song, bible, graphics, etc.
4. I HATE the Apple Font Panel across all Apple apps. I can't understand why Apple can't get this right. Some of the font panels features are nice, but, man I need to see my fonts wysiwyg in a menu item all listed at once.. I like the font size slider, but I waste so much time trying to get the right font. I don't want to see one font at a time in wysiwyg. I used to use Fontcard, but Unanity is taking FOREVER to get it universal.
5. I hate the default opening "choose a theme" thing. Give me the choice to turn that off.
6. The slide browser on the left of the main window needs to be able to resize. Do these Apple designers have Superman eyes? My presentations run into the hundreds of slides, cause the subject can go on for months. Hard to organize that list. Some kind of color labeling or something, would help here in the browser.
7. Let me make the slide window as small as I want and my notes area larger. As a teacher, I really concentrate on the notes after buiding the slides.
This is getting long, sorry. I love Keynote!!!!!
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Jamus said 1:52PM on 11-10-2006
If I am giving a presentation, I use Keynote.
If I am making a presentation, I use PowerPoint.
Keynote blows it away when it comes to style and professional feel. However I still use PowerPoint to make the marketing if others have to use it. Keynote exports to PPT, but funny things still happen.
You give me "Keynote 3.x" AND have it do a slambam presentation-to-DVD export and I am sold! The current export just doesn't quite do it.
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Cameron Campbell said 1:59PM on 11-10-2006
I used it for my MA presentation, they didn't have a copy on the laptop I borrowed, so I just exported it as QT, it worked amazingly well.
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Lars said 1:49PM on 11-10-2006
I have made my last few presentations using Keynote, and there are a lot of things that I really like about it. By far the most useful feature for me is how Keynote makes it a snap (literally) to align objects and text on a slide. If powerpoint has this feature, I haven't found it. The Keynote templates are all pretty classy, whereas Powerpoint is a bit too clip-arty for my tastes. Overall, it's just simple and enjoyable to use, and I think I'll only resort to using Powerpoint if I know I'm not going to have my laptop with me.
I have a few specific niggles with the program. First, it gets a little tiresome when I want to draw a figure using the shapes. Keynote plunks down a prefilled circle or square, or a line or arrow and forces me to adjust them to my needs. Ideally it would give me a tool for drawing my own shapes or lines and remember the last colour/fill setting so I didn't need to change it every time. It's only a couple extra mouse clicks, but it bugs me a little.
Second, the media browser is all but useless to me, and I suspect also to anyone else using keynote for work. It only allows me to select pictures from iPhoto, music or sounds from iTunes or video clips from my Movies folder. I don't keep any of my work files in any of these places, and it would be nice to have the option of customizing the media browser to include folders where I do keep my work stuff. Dragging and dropping works fine, but it would be great if I didn't have to keep switching to my finder window for media.
Lastly - and this is probably more my error than Keynote's - I can't seem to stop video clips from playing automatically on a slide, when I would prefer them to start on a click. Anyone?
No program is going to be perfect for everyone, and my Powerpoint complaints outnumber these by a factor of ten, so Keynote is my presentation program of choice for now.
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mdipi said 2:02PM on 11-10-2006
I love Keynote as well. I use it over PowerPoint for every presentation that I have to give.
It's easy to use and incredibly powerful, and makes really pretty slide shows with ease.
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Tostada said 1:55PM on 11-10-2006
One thing I wish keynote had was the ability to see multiple slides ahead in the presentor view. Powerpoint has this and i use italot because we dont always go from slide to slide but instead jump around a little. So that would be nice.
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Lars said 1:53PM on 11-10-2006
Oh yeah, I love the presenter's display too. I have it set up so that I can see the next slide or animation coming up, with notes and a timer... very handy and has made my slide transitions much smoother knowing what's coming next.
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johnny said 1:55PM on 11-10-2006
Keynote is tremendous. It's ridiculously better than Powerpoint but I would not call it Apple's best app. There are problems but with Apple releasing a new Keynote every year, I'm very excited that the updates are right around the corner.
Big Problems:
• The Inspector pannel, Font pannel, Color pannel, all the pannels could really be better integrated. Changing a color of a font or object should be a lot easier.
• Layers, Powerpoint doesn't have it yet but Keynote really needs Photoshop style layer menus so animating complex slides could be a lot easier.
• Animation is not as robust as Powerpoint, you can't define a path for an object to travel.
• More shadow and filter effects would be nice. The reflection is a nice touch but it'd be useful to have more.
• Master/Slave slide concept could be executed in a better way, its difficult to use and it's hard to make a complete template w/o being a very experienced pro.
The reasons why I use Keynote almost everyday:
• Vector objects and the ability to copy paste styles, it just makes things so much faster and easier. Especially since its an easy keyboard shortcut
• The type is always anti-aliased and its alwas tremendous.
• Animations are about as good as anything out there.
• It handles embeded videos very well (but could be better). You can hand off a Keynote file and it has all the video files. This is almost impossible in OSX Powerpoint due to bugs.
Ultimately, all of these criticisms are also valid for Pages (which is fantastic too). A real tip for Keynote users, buy a widescreen monitor.
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running said 2:01PM on 11-10-2006
Keynote is simply one of the best slideshow aplications, but I have to make presentations to school, where is only Windoze stations with PowerPoint (and also one Linux station with openoffice and some KOffice), and there is simply no easy way to make some system independent slideshows.... making 60 MB big quicktime movie is not a solution.
People also forget Pages, which is a very good text editor too, you can make a really nice magazines or letters with a few clicks, and what is more, you can transger it to PDF, which is perfectly readable on both Windoze and Linux machines.
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teece said 2:00PM on 11-10-2006
Keynote rocks. I gave a talk at a math conference. I was the only presenter that used Keynote for slides.
You could tell. My slides were beautiful and professional looking. Everybody else had used Powerpoint: ugly colors, clunky fonts, bad design.
(Not dissing those people -- Keynote did the work for me, and Powerpoint didn't for them).
It was also dead simple to do. Plus, with LaTeXIt, it was really easy to create PDFs of equations from text snippets and drag and drop them right on the Keynote slides. Because of Apple's excellent PDF support, this was 100% painless. I was the only one there with correctly typeset equations, including among the professional mathematicians ( I was just a student presenter).
It was also very painless to get text tables out of Mathematica in a vector format (pict) for Keynote to use, too.
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nic mitham said 2:04PM on 11-10-2006
Keynote is easily my favourite mac app.
My favourite features are:
1. Cube transition. If I had a quid for everytime i gave a presentation and someone commented on the cube
2. Export to quicktime movie.....yes, of course with the cube animation..spread the word
3. General handling of image files such as eps
4. Lighting effects on 3d graphs
But, it also needs the ability to have 2nd y axis graphs.
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Romain Guy said 2:24PM on 11-10-2006
I do a lot of presentations and I simply hate PowerPoint with all my guts. But I love Keynote. Go figure ;-) Keynote is simply great to work with. Very usable, very intuitive, comes with great templates, it has nice and cool effects (for the first time ever I used slide transitions) and so on.
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Tim said 2:12PM on 11-10-2006
I used Keynote for my final dissertation presentation at the University of Cambridge this past summer; combined with Salling Clicker running on my S60 phone hidden in my pocket, I blew my evaluators' minds with the slickness of the whole thing.
They asked me afterwards how I managed to time the auto-advance of each slide so well, and how on earth did I make PowerPoint look so good. The only answer I had was "I didn't" on both points.
Keynote makes you look good.
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uncle jerry said 2:15PM on 11-10-2006
Hi Scott, I would like to see a keynote of yours sometime. The only one I've ever seen is the one His Greatness does a couple of times a year. How about the next time you do a TUAW video podcast, you throw in a Keynote?
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Schlaeps said 2:14PM on 11-10-2006
Love Keynote.
My only complaint is that you can't see more than one slide ahead of you at a time and that it's hard to control other software (like iTunes) from the dual screen presentation mode.
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