TUAW First Look: Keynote '09

Call me a curmudgeon, but I detest slide presentations. Ugh, even typing that gave me the heeby-jeebies. I've sat through too many demos during which some absolute bore read to me as if we were in preschool circle time. Not to mention the blue, marbleized buttons and millions of bullet points. Oh, the bullet points.

When Keynote was introduced in January of 2003, my feelings were mixed. On one hand, Apple is a stylish company that makes thoughtful, easy to use software. On the other hand, this was presentation software. How good could it be? The answer is "pretty darn good," and even better now with the latest version of Keynote.

When you first launch the demo version of iWork, you're greeted with an invitation to try or buy the software. This splash screen is much more attractive in '09 than it was in '08, and that change is indicative of nearly every aspect of Keynote '09: It's very beautiful.

Click below to read more.

Keynote 09

Forget function for the time being. This application is gorgeous. For example, check out the toolbar icons at right. The '09 versions (bottom) are less "busy." The thick border around the "Themes" icon is gone. The lines inside the "Masters" icon are thinner. Even the "View" icon uses a brighter blue (#93dbfc vs. #a0d2e9). Also note the addition of "Guides" in '09. Use it to turn guides on and off or enable different options.

It gets better. Select "Rehearse Slideshow" from the "Play" menu and you're presented with a display that blows the '08 version out of the water (you'll find comparison screen shots in the gallery above). From there, you can view the current and upcoming slide, presenter notes, the current time and the elapsed time (or time remaining if you've got a target limit). Go even further and customize this screen by selecting "Customize Presenter Display." I love it.

But how does it work? When you first launch Keynote, you're presented with the Theme Chooser, which has borrowed a few design elements from iPhoto. First, you can scrub over a theme's icon to see all of the templates in that theme, similar to scrubbing over an iPhoto event. A new slider lets you resize the theme icons, and the whole thing features that beautiful grey theme. Also noteworthy is that the Theme Chooser stands alone in Keynote '09. In '08, it hovered above the main editing window.

Actually building a slideshow isn't much different that it was in '08. The new transitions are nice, especially the text effects, but the mechanics of assembling a slide are very similar to last year's version.

The new iWork.com feature is pretty neat. Once a project is complete, you can click the "iWork" icon in the toolbar to have a version uploaded to iWork.com. You'll be prompted to send an email requesting someone else to review your work.

The web-based version of your project looks exactly like the real thing, and can receive notes and comments from any user invited to participate. I can see this becoming a great collaboration tool for remote teams, but I doubt I'll use it personally.

Now for my hesitations. Keynote has a lot of sweet eye candy, and the temptation to overdo it with nifty transitions is terrible. There's a real "because I can" mentality that takes over, like a cartoon devil on your shoulder. "Just one more bounce transition," he says. "Ooh, and that text sparkle. Did you try the water droplet yet? What about Cube? Duuuude."

I've seen Keynote presentations where the content was overshadowed by the flips and tricks that accompanied every new bit of information. That's really the fault of the presenter, though, not the software. I think.

My advice is this. If you're the type who builds lots of these things, you'll enjoy using Keynote. It's fun to put presentations together when the tools are this pleasant, and the integration with iPhoto and iTunes via the Media Browser is wonderfully convenient. Those who enjoyed Keynote '08 will absolutely love '09. You can download the 30 day free trial here, or buy the package for $79US (unfortunately, there's no special upgrade pricing). iWork '09 requires Mac OS X v10.4.11 or Mac OS X 10.5.6 or later.

Just go easy on the flashy bits, OK? I'm begging you.

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Source: http://apple.com/ilife/keynote

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Call me a curmudgeon, but I detest slide presentations. Ugh, even typing that gave me the heeby-jeebies. I've sat through too many demos...

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KBeat

They inexplicably removed "web view" from Keynote '09. Perhaps you've never heard of it or never used it, but if you ever imbedded web pages into presentations (common for showroom kiosk presentations that customers can run), this is a big loss.

The only option now is to use a static screen grab of a site. Web view automatically updated the presentation with the latest content from a web site. I'm stunned they pulled this very useful feature.

January 10 2009 at 9:29 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

David Jarman

Hello folks - generally positive comments on Keynote 09 here, which is great.

Has anyone got any feedback on the filesize reduction feature? I'm in academia in Edinburgh, UK, and pepper my presentations with CC images from Flickr. The resulting file is pretty big, but of more concern are the huge PDFs that result for the students to download. Cutting these back would almost be enough to invest in it (at the bargain education price of Â£34.50 - about US$4.75 these days).

January 09 2009 at 7:40 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brian

How about custom animation paths? For example, to make an object move from one part of a slide to another, to illustrate a process. PowerPoint Windows has always been able to do this, but never the Mac version, and never Keynote, to my knowledge. Correct me if I'm mistaken.

January 09 2009 at 2:13 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Brian's comment

Dean Baird

Keynote 08 and 09 allow motion on a path, rotation, scaling, and opacity actions. Old news.

January 11 2009 at 4:20 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

schrammalama

What ever happened to backwards compatibility.

When iWork '08 came out, users of iWork '06 could not open files saved from '08. This sucked, but I figured there was a reasonable technical reason as to why. Plus you could save in '06 format. Now iWork '09 comes out and the same story. I'm beginning to to think that Apple is deliberately doing this to force people and companies to upgrade. This sucks! I should upgrade on the merits of the updated features, but an artificial obsoleteness.

G

January 08 2009 at 6:06 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

John Kubie

I've used keynote since its birth and really love it. Have 09 on order.

limitations in keynote vs powerpoint:

1. cannot draw on top of a slide.
2. less flexible formating of handouts.

Haven't heard mention of these. Any surprises? Are they there?

January 08 2009 at 4:15 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

vanaheim7

iWork.com is nice. We've tried sharing presentations via the internet among people in Japan, China, Germany and the US. Each can make comments on presentation. Download options include iWork 09, iWOrk 08, ppt and pdf. Those who do not have 09 yet can participate in various way (online and offline). It turned out to be really handy. When you want to share ideas among multiple people, web-sharing works much elegantly than e-mails. I'm loving it.

January 08 2009 at 2:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Stephen Lang

The new iWork.com thing sounds great, and looks great. I don't think it is worth paying for in its current iteration. You can email the presentation and get feedback already, which I understand is less convenient and elegant but still. I think the current version will be a relatively niche service (which is fine of course...)

What would be worth paying for is being able to actually edit iWork documents online. Hopefully that will come at a later date.

January 08 2009 at 12:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

oraculo666

Sometimes I really wish I was back in college so I had a real use for presentation software. But Keynote presentations were the first ones I've seen that encouraged people to come up after the presentation to ask how were they done.

January 08 2009 at 12:16 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to oraculo666's comment

Stephen Lang

No, see- if it was great presentation software, they'd be coming up to ask questions about the actual presentation, not the presentation software! ;-)

January 08 2009 at 12:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Actually, I've had clients come up to me afterwards to talk about the content because they had no idea how a presentation was produced, and because they weren't thinking about their own bad ppt experiences they were actually able to concentrate on the content that was more transparently delivered and immediate in its impact.

And I've seen the same clients attempt a later presentation (sometimes days, weeks , or months later) where they then ask me how something was done because they want to use it to show their boss or to show the street.

Bottom line, if you know how to use Keynote, it rocks compared to other presentation software and the 09 update only helps maintain the lead.

January 08 2009 at 3:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mark

Remember that the tool is only as good as the person who knows how to use it. I love Keynote and its effects, ease of use, etc., but if you don't know how to design and deliver an effective presentation and pack your Keynote full of bulleted text and just read off the slides, then you're no better off than PowerPoint.

Use pictures, less text. Don't expect people to read handouts/text on screen AND listen to your blabbing at the same time. Have a big enough screen so that everyone in the room can actually see. Etc. Etc.

I will say that Keynote does save a presentation from the PowerPoint pitfall of the Cheesy Effect. Seriously, what was the rationale at Microsoft for all of those awful sound effects and animations?

January 08 2009 at 10:35 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Mark's comment

Hear hear, Mark! I totally agree, and it's good to see someone else espousing smart presentations. Personally, I read "Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story" a few years ago and it totally changed my presentation style and way of public speaking. Soon after reading the book I put together an IT security briefing for our practice and received numerous compliments on it afterwards from the audience members, none of whom were IT folks. Combining what I learned in the book with Keynote will hopefully help me put together even better briefings.

If anyone's interested in the book, you can buy it via Amazon at
http://www.amazon.com/Presenting-Win-Telling-Your-Story/dp/0131875108/. Everyone I know who's read it has raved about it later.

January 08 2009 at 5:04 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Steven

@Hyperplasia, yes you can export into 'ppt' when using Keynote, but you'll lose lots of the cool stuff that Keynote can do, but PowerPoint cannot, such as the great visual effects.

I often use Keynote for classes, and the effects get 'ooohs' and 'aaahs' of amazement from the kids, which keeps their attention nicely!

January 08 2009 at 10:16 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Steven's comment

Aaron Miller

I teach with Keynote as well. I regularly get comments from students that my slides are the best in the college. It has more to do with Keynote than with me.

January 08 2009 at 10:44 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Patriks7

I gotta agree.. I do my presentations in Keynote as well and it is a million times better than Powerpoint for my usage. Last time I even managed to convince the teacher to give me a couple points extra because everyone in class was like "wow that was the most awesome presentation ever!" :p
I haven't looked much into iWork.com yet, but I hope there is an option to play an actual presentation through that, so that I won't have to bring all the cables and stuff for my presentations (My school has a shitload of cash, yet we are still on XP.. *sigh*)

January 08 2009 at 5:09 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply