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.

Top20 iPhone Games Analysis 09/2009

View more presentations from HandyGames Germany.

The folks over at German developer HandyGames originally put together this slideshow presentation for their own internal use, but they determined that it actually could be useful for almost anyone following iPhone releases and their development, so they released it out into the world. And they were right -- there's some good info in here. Basically, they did a survey of the top 20 apps, both paid and free in five different regions of the world on the App Store, and then compared different qualities of all of those apps to see what the most successful apps had in common.

What did they find? Things like the fact that the majority of top 20 apps do not use all caps for the title and use an original IP for their releases. The differences are interesting as well: most paid apps are made by recognizable developers, while most free apps are made by smaller publishers. Free apps receive many, many more reviews than paid apps, though (if I'm reading the presentation right) they tend to be rated lower. Chillingo is the App Store's most prolific top developer, while Digital Chocolate releases games most often, with a full 1.5 releases per week since (I suppose) they started publishing games.

Very interesting stuff, though the numbers still require a little backgound knowledge to deciper (Backflip Studios appears in a few rankings, even though they've only just started releasing games last month -- popular games, but only a few games nonetheless). Cool to get an overall snapshot of the kinds of games that are doing well on the App Store so far.

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 consider myself a power Keynote user, and overwhelmingly prefer the app over PowerPoint (on both the Mac and PC) -- even though though I'm just as well-versed at PowerPoint. Only on rare occasions do I start my presentation workflow in PowerPoint (if the deck is going to be chart-centric, to avoid the limited axis and error bar support in pre-09 versions of Keynote).

While both Keynote and Powerpoint get you from Point A to Point B, it's the "little things," such as alignment guides and better graphics support (i.e., native support for Photoshop PSDs and Illustrator AIs), that make the presentation journey that much more enjoyable and more presentable.

One of these little things is Presenter View. Although PowerPoint has a similar feature (in both Mac and PC versions) it lacks the polish and ease-of-use found in Keynote. Presenter View allows you to look at your slide's notes, and upcoming slides and builds, without your audience's knowledge.

Videro is one of those silent-but-cool application suites you've probably never heard of, but you may see it being used every day. I met some of the Videro team at WWDC, and they were happy to demo a little of what the tools do: electronic signage and interactive kiosks. If you happen to need an animated in-store (or museum) display, fed from a server, easy to set up and deploy, complete with iPhone access to check on the servers (so they say), then Videro is an impressive tool.

To start, Videro has a composition tool that allows you to drag and drop your animations, complete with images, video and audio. In fact, Videro has extensive in-app tools for cropping, rotating and otherwise "fixing" your assets for display. But wait, there's more! This isn't just Keynote all gussied up. Videro is designed for business, and a server application makes sure mission-critical displays are functioning properly. There's solid asset management support both in the client and the server applications, making sure your displays never fire off with a dreaded "black box of nothing" where a product shot should be.

Videro mentioned an iPhone app in the video but I have been unable to locate it in the store and a search on their website revealed nothing. Still, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to provide some baseline stats via password-protected web app. We weren't able to get Wi-Fi at our location, so some features weren't visible and this might have been one of them.

Unfortunately Videro's site mentions nothing about price. In my experience that means we're talking about an expensive solution, and likely a custom one for the high-end customers. If you're looking for something simpler, don't miss Dave's excellent post about using Keynote and Dropbox to create an updating and easy presentation solution that would work in a pinch.

You may remember Steve Ballmer (CEO of some other company) criticizing the iPod and iPhone on several occasions. Something that he definitely cannot criticize is the Mac, mostly because he was seen using one for with one at the podium while he gave a presentation. MacLife pointed us to this Flickr picture showing what really powers the other Steve's presentation. What's there? You guessed it, a MacBook Pro. We imagine that it is running Windows via BootCamp, proving once again that the best Windows machine money can buy is a Mac.

I guess Microsoft is staring to "Think Different," eh?

Update: As noted by several Flickr commenters, Ballmer didn't actually use the Mac to present; all that was displayed was his title slide, most likely driven by backstage gear, and presumably the MacBook Pro was left at the podium by the conference organizers or a previous presenter. Still a pleasant thought to imagine him slaving away over his PowerPoint (or Keynote!) presentation on the MBP, but it doesn't look like that's how it went.

Back in October, Apple dropped DVDs as their distribution system of choice for WWDC sessions and presentation slides. The company moved all this content to iTunes - but only for Select and Premiere members of the ADC (Apple Developer Connection). Today I just received an ADC email titled "Watch Mac OS X State of the Union," re-announcing the availability of this content, but seemingly for all ADC members. This time around there is no talk of access only for specific members, so it sounds like anyone with a valid ADC account of one level or another can access this library of Mac OS X development goodness. We would post the URL, but it seems as though it is only accessible by logging into one's ADC account online.

[Update: According to readers, it sounds like only the general State of the Union sessions are offered, while access to "the juicy stuff" still requires a Leopard Early Starter Kit.]

If, for one reason or another, you don't have or don't want Microsoft Office installed, but you still need to view a doc, spreadsheet or presentation, the ThinkFree Online office crew have created a couple widgets (and even a Google module) to help ease your pain. I haven't been following ThinkFree's products very closely, but one of their services called the ThinkFree Viewer lets anyone publish a document online by linking to their web-based viewer - this removes a visitor's need to have one compatible app or another installed just to be able to view the file.

To make things even easier for those attachments you receive or the occasional document you simply have lying around, they have now released a new Dashboard widget and a Google module (for their Personalized Homepage), in addition to the Yahoo! Widget we blogged way back in May. These all work essentially the same way: drag and drop a compatible ThinkFree or Microsoft Office doc onto the widget, and it will upload the file to ThinkFree's temporary online viewer so you can crack it open with the least amount of hassle. Of course, there might be limitations to what their viewer can render, but this should make things a little easier for non-Office Office users out there.

Our hearts go out to all the Apple Expo Paris attendees in the audience, for Steve Jobs will not be giving a keynote yet again this year. In fact, there won't be any keynote at all. A show representative confirmed this keynote-less announcement with Macworld UK, citing that, while Apple has seen "significant" market share gains in France lately, they also mention the whole 'open up your FairPlay, or else' issue the French government is trying to force on Apple.

That doesn't seem like a very good reason for Jobs to stop delivering his theatrical keynotes, though he was having surgery during 2004's paris expo, and for some odd reason didn't give a keynote at '05's Expo either. I guess the closest you'll be able to get to Mr. Jobs this time around is some hi-res desktop wallpapers.

After weeks of ambiguous hints and torturous teasing, The Omni Group has unveiled their newest product, and it definitely isn't a Sweedish meatball maker. Introducing: OmniDazzle, a "set of fun and useful enhancements that help you track the location of your mouse pointer and provide options for highlighting certain areas of your screen". Basically, it's like one of those mouse-trailing toys tools with some actually useful goodness baked in. For example, OmniDazzle can place a spotlight on your mouse, dimming the background and helping you or your audience focus on what's important. It offers other interesting tools for pinpointing your mouse and even drawing on screen for those times when crayons just won't do. In fact, there's a lot of quirky (and handy) stuff OmniDazzle is capable of, so why not check it out while it's in beta?

In a move that I'm sure is just begging for the wrath of Jobs, someone has put together a well-crafted blooper video that looks at the best quirks, mistakes and glitches of Steve Jobs' Macworld keynotes. The video is hosted at YouTube and we're linking to it here, so you should be able to click on the image above and play it right here in TUAW (or your RSS reader) as long as Flash is enabled.

I have to agree with the post at FreeMacBlog: it's pretty tough to watch this and not squirm at least a little, especially during my personal favorite: the 2005 keynote when I believe it was Sony's CEO who painfully stumbled and blundered through a speech about... well I don't even remember what it was about anymore.

This video is a nice reminder of those unfortunate (yet darn funny) blooper moments of Macworld keynotes that we all so easily forget once we open our new [insert Apple product here]. Check out FreeMacBlog's post where I found this, or head over to YouTube where the video lives - at least for now.