keynote posts

One gem in Mac OS X that sometimes gets glanced over is the Services menu. Lots of readers may not know yet that Snow Leopard brought with it the ability to create your own customized service in Automator -- in other words, you can get additional selections on a contextual menu when right-clicking within a certain context, say a file within a Finder window. To create a customized service, all you have to do is launch Automator and select "Services" from the "Choose a template for your workflow" window, and then insert your own service from there.

Here are five customized services for you to install on your own Mac.

Imagine if, as Steve Jobs moves through each slide of his Keynote presentation, he also has the telepathic powers to automatically tweet information related to the slide.

But even the almighty Steve Jobs can't do that.

Fortunately for him, there's Keynote Tweet. An open source AppleScript app, Keynote Tweet will automatically tweet the text from your presenter notes (accessible by clicking on "view" and selecting "show presenter notes").

Keynote Tweet was exposed to me while reading a piece by IDEO Labs' Gentry Underwood, who highlights the idea of large presentations increasingly occurring within the context of a backchannel in which audience members are responding to what's being presented.

Getting Keynote Tweet up and running is fairly straightforward. Simply download the app, and then add the following entry into the Keychain Access app:

• Keychain Item Name: http://twitter.com
• Account Name: Your email address
• Password: Your Twitter password

Now, with the Keynote Tweet app running, any text between the [twitter] and [/twitter] tags will automatically tweet when that slide is displayed (while in slideshow mode).

For example, "Jay Leno lacks the charm, wit and red headedness of Conan O' Brien" will be tweeted the moment I reach the slide showing the percentage of people that hate Jay Leno.

Keynote Tweet is available as a free download here.

[via IDEO Labs]

The iWork suite of apps (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) play nice with each other -- for the most part. Objects such as shapes, text boxes and tables created in one app can easily be copied and pasted onto another and retain their styles. Even an image with an instant alpha filter applied will retain its transparency when pasted onto another iWork app. However, the iWork apps don't always play nice with each other when it comes to charts.

In particular, copying a chart created in Numbers and pasting it onto either a Keynote presentation or Pages document doesn't always bring the chart's legend with it respective to how it looked in Numbers. Sometimes, the legend may be misaligned, and sometimes it may even show up on a completely different page in the document.

To address this annoyance, just highlight all of the elements (the entire chart and the legend, or anything else you want retained) of the chart that you'd like to copy. Then click on Numbers "Arrange" menu and select "Group" (or hit Command-Option-G). Now, the legend of your chart retains its alignment when pasted onto either a Keynote presentation or a Pages document. To alter or undo this, just select "Ungroup" (Command-Option-Shift-G) from the same file menu.

In Apple's iWork suite, the "Paste and Match Style" or "Paste Style" options, as implied in their names, allow you to paste the style from one element onto another; or to paste an element into a document and to match the style of the document that it's getting pasted to. In many ways, they're the iWork equivalent of "format painter" found in Microsoft Office. And, in many ways, they're much better.

In "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs," Carmine Gallo provides a framework for you to deliver a keynote like Steve does. The book provides both an Al Michaels and John Madden perspective of Jobs's keynotes: a play-by-play account of events married with analytical insight.

While rich in detailing the stylistics of Jobs's presentations and the empirical evidence supporting it -- for example, limiting bullet points on slides, using simple language, and using the rule of threes to enhance a narrative -- the most captivating portion of the book is how it details Steve Jobs's preparation for his keynotes. Yes, even Steve Jobs, like the rest of us, must prepare for his preparations presentations.

And prepare he does, which is evident in the stories of Paul Vais. An executive at Jobs's former company NeXT (that Apple later acquired, which brought Jobs back into the Apple fold), Vais recalled that "every slide was written like a piece of poetry...[and that] Steve would labor over the presentation. We'd try to orchestrate and choreograph everything and make it more alive than it really is." However, Gallo says that "making your presentation 'more alive' takes practice. Once you accept this simple principle, your presentations will stand out in a sea of mediocrity."

Gallo's book follows many of the "Jobsian" presentation mantras he preaches. Like a Steve Jobs keynote, the book is simple to read and provides an easy-to-follow roadmap for a reference-minded reader. The one thing that most readers will walk away with is that Steve Jobs's on-stage presence evinces a style similar to that of Apple's products when they're on the stage of the showroom floor or marketed on Apple's website. As a result, as much as it serves as a Steve Jobs presentation guidebook, "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" in many ways is a Steve Jobs biography.

"The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" is available at many booksellers, including Borders, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.

In Keynote (and also in PowerPoint), a build refers to the appearance and/or disappearance of elements (such as text, bullets, images, audio and movies) within a given slide.

Working with builds is relatively straightforward. You select the item(s) that you want to create a build for and then choose the order to activate or deactivate each element. These controls are accessible via the Build Inspector pane, which you can get to by clicking on Inspector button or with the Command-Option-i keyboard shortcut. By default, builds are activated by a click with your mouse, or via the spacebar or right-arrow key on your keyboard.

There may be times when you want to add some creativity and more Steve-ness to your builds, and automated builds provide you this functionality.

In this picture, I have three elements that I want to "build in," or have appear, on the screen. I want "Who?" to show up first, "What?" to show up second, and "I don't know" to show up third

Using the Keynote defaults, these elements would show up in the order that I click: "Who?" after the first click, "What?" after the second click, and "I don't know" after the third click.

But let's say I wanted "What?" and "I don't know" to automatically appear in sequence after I click on "Who?" To do this, I just need to change the "Start Build" options of both elements. For the "What?" build, instead of choosing "On Click," I'm going to choose the "Automatically after Build 1." And for the "I don't know" build, I'm going to choose "Automatically after Build 2." Now, "What" and "I don't know" will automatically build in after "Who?" is clicked.

One neat thing about automatic builds is that they can apply to "actions" as well. So if, in this baseball example, we want the elements to move to different bases after a build, we would apply the same "Automatically after..." logic to them.

Got more Keynote tips (or want more)? Let us know in the comments.

Out of the box, Apple's Keynote is a gem. The app is intuitive and, like many Apple products, strikes a nice and delicate balance between ease-of-use for novice users and functionality for more advanced power users. While Keynote offers a nice set of built-in themes, there may be times when you want a more customized look -- be it a different resolution, font, background or element or graphic.

To begin, choose an existing theme. Here, I'm choosing to use the default "White" Keynote theme. Then, you'll want to modify the master slides, which is accessible by pulling down the divider adjacent to the "Slides" viewer, or by clicking "View" and selecting "Show Master Slides."

I recently noted the image-editing functionality of Preview.app, which can act as a "good enough" image editor for many that don't have access to Photoshop. While it's difficult to argue with the free price tag, Preview is not without its limitations. Fortunately, many of these limitations are unlocked if you happen to own Apple's iWork suite, which in its own right can serve as an image editor for the budget-minded.Read on to see how to use iWork in this unconventional way.