Apple's marquee presentation tool may make it easy to look professional when it comes to showing off in front of an in-person audience, but when it comes to sharing those killer decks online the choices have been limited; Keynote's package-based file format made uploading and decoding pretty challenging for most. Among these, Slideshare stood out by allowing Keynote uploads -- assuming you compressed your file to a .zip before shipping it along.

Now that Keynote '09 does automatic compression of .key files (which makes it a lot easier to throw them on a flash drive, among other things), Slideshare has announced direct support for Keynote files. Upload your presentations with glee, and share them at will! The conversion process is still a bit rough around the edges, so in some cases you may have better results by saving the Keynote file to PPT instead... but it's still a welcome development.

[via KeynoteUser]

You can create some wonderful visual effects with Keynote '09; good enough, in some cases, to make experienced After Effects artists say "You did that in Keynote?!," which is always very satisfying. Despite Keynote's power for presentations, there are a few things that it doesn't do natively -- play video during a transition, for instance. Fortunately, some of these tricks can be accomplished by a long-honored approach known as "faking it."

If you have a video playing in the background of a slide while you trigger a dissolve transition to the next slide, ordinarily you'll see a distracting freeze of the video playback as the transition effect runs. The way around this, usable for many (not all) slide transitions, is to pull the transition forward into the slide with the video.

I do this by grabbing a screenshot of the initial state of the next slide, and then do a build-in action to dissolve (or flip, or what have you) that screenshot into the slide that's playing the video, above the video. The video keeps playing behind the screenshot as it dissolves in, and then you can gracefully move to the next slide, invisibly or with a dissolve -- the placeholder screenshot and the slide should be indistinguishable. In practice, this works better with a fade through black or a solid color than with a slide graphic, as the alignment can be tricky, but if you play around with it you can get it to work well.

Sounds confusing? Allow me to demonstrate with a brief screencast in the 2nd half of the post. You'll see the "vanilla" transition including the video freeze, and then the fake transition that's done by dissolving a full-screen graphic in over the video as it plays. (The video clip is my poorly-shot night line cinematography from the opening of the NYC 14th Street Apple Store.)

Updated to clarify that the process uses a build-in action, not a transition.

Coming up soon: my favorite Keynote trick for visual fireworks.

Ivan at the great Creative Bits has posted a nice tutorial on creating animated charts in Keynote. It's a simple process really, making use of the build feature of the Inspector. You've got to love Keynote. Even a person who dislikes slide shows (like me) can enjoy putting one together.

If you're after more powerful chart and graph options in Keynote, check out Chart Gallery. For even more Keynote fun, you can't miss Keynote User or our own first look at Keynote '09.

One of the coolest features of the just announced Keynote '09 is the corresponding $0.99 iPhone / iPod touch controller application (iTunes link) which allows you to advance slides, see your notes, and even see your next slide on your mobile device's screen so long as it's connected to the same wifi network. Once I had a look at it, however, I was surprised to discover that there were already several similar applications available in the iTunes store which work with Keynote '08 and even have quite a few more functions.

I haven't had a chance to test them all, but there are at least four applications out there including (all iTunes links): Pointer Remote (which also works with PowerPoint) ($0.99), jfControl ($3.99), AirMote ($4.99), and Stage Hand ($7.99). Three of the four require installing a small helper app on your Mac which then interfaces with the iPhone app (AirMote is the exception since it uses the Mac's built-in VNC protocols). Of these, Stage Hand seems to have the most features, including some nifty ones like advancing directly to a particular slide, on-device timers, a highlighter, and a blackout/whiteout function. (Stage Hand presently has limited Keynote '09 compatibility, but they say they're working on it.)

Let us know in the comments what your favorite iPhone / iPod touch based Keynote remote control is.