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.

Apple has extended every MobileMe subscription by a month, due to the exceptionally ornery transition this past week.

"The .Mac to MobileMe transition was a lot rockier than we had hoped," Apple spokesman Bill Evans told Macworld. "We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge."

An email sent to subscribers noted that "we have worked through those problems, and the web apps are now up and running," but several pages of comments from our readers suggest otherwise. TUAW staff with MobileMe accounts agreed yesterday that the service is mostly working, but still quirky.

Also in the email, the MobileMe team has promised to stop using the word "push" to describe some aspects of MobileMe's functionality "until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too." This might suggest they're closing the loop on MobileMe's push technology for all connected devices.

Hopefully this goes a long way to assuage the burning, burning rage that MobileMe users have been feeling recently.

(You can read the full letter, after the jump.)

Thanks, Rick, Frank, Mark, Chuck and James for the tip!

The Inquirer isn't just counting their chickens before they hatch -- they're counting all the feathers, the chicken feet, and even the eggs of those chickens, too. When we first heard that the slide you see above (reportedly from a CeBit presentation from Intel) apparently meant that Apple was going to put an Intel x86 "Moorestown" processor in the iPhone, we did a double take, and then a triple take (how is the iPhone not the one labeled "Premium Smartphone?"), and then we said, "they're kidding, right?"

But no, apparently they weren't: Apple Insider has jumped on the x86Phone bandwagon as well (granted, they originally jumped in December of last year). It took Apple about ten years to decide to switch its computer line to Intel chips, but if you're willing to believe the reasoning on this one (and personally, I'm not), it's only going to take a tenth of that to decide that the iPhone needs an x86 chip, too.

[Via Techmeme]