First Look: Keynote 2

When it came on the scene two years ago, Keynote (   , April 2003 ) was really the first viable presentation tool alternative to Microsoft’s PowerPoint on the Mac. While Apple’s offering surpassed PowerPoint in some areas (transitions, graphics handling, professionalism of templates), it fell far short in others (detailed info on slides during presentations, automatic animation options, slide timing). Keynote 2— unveiled at Macworld Expo and now shipping as part of the iWork ’05 suite—aims to narrow the gap, while adding even more compelling features.

Here’s a first look at some of the major changes in the latest version of Keynote.

Themes

Themes have always been a strong point of Keynote; they are very well designed, and help even the most completely inartistic (yours truly) create visually stunning presentations. Apple has added ten new themes to Keynote, while removing Leather Book and Sandstone. (If you’d like to keep these extinct themes, see the hint at the end of this article ). As seen in the screenshot, the collection of themes is truly impressive. Some of these themes have been designed to work with other new Keynote features to help create “non-standard” presentations. For instance, you could use the Portfolio theme and the new hyperlinking features (see below) to create an archive of your paintings or photographs that visitors could simply click through to view.

Animations, Transitions, and External Media

Animation of both objects and text has improved greatly. In the first release, there were just nine options for types of “builds,” which is a shortcut term for animating the text and graphics on your slides. In the second release, there are now 26 different techniques, including choices such as iris, twirl, pop, and cube. In addition, some of these build types work on individual words or characters within a line, as seen in this movie, which shows the “character compression” build working on a character-by-character basis. In the previous version of Keynote, build effects could only be applied to entire lines.

The other notable improvement has to do with the timing of the builds. In the first generation of Keynote, you could only pick one of five preset speeds for the build, and only the first build could happen automatically—any subsequent builds on a slide required a mouse click. The new version lets you specify, down to hundredths of a second, precisely how long each build should take. Even more important for those creating complex presentations, a new automatic build tool lets you control exactly how subsequent builds are added to the slide—either via a mouse click, or automatically after a given delay, as seen in the screenshot. This gives the presenter a great deal of flexibility in building complex self-building slides.

Transitions are visual effects applied when switching from slide to slide. The original version was best known for its rotating 3-D cube transition, whereby one slide seemingly rotated around a cube to the next. The new version adds a very elegant page flip 3-D transition, and seven additional 2-D transitions, including the cool pond ripple effect seen in this movie clip.

Finally, if you want to incorporate music, photos, or videos into your presentation, the new Keynote makes it a piece of cake. You can easily set a song to play as a background track for your entire presentation (this wasn’t easily possible in the previous version). As seen in the screenshot, a new Media Browser makes it simple to integrate pictures from iPhoto, music from iTunes, and movies from your Movies folder. Saving even more time, large images can be masked directly in Keynote, letting you decide just which portion of the image will be visible on the slide.

Text, Web Pages, and Other Objects

Text handling has also gotten some attention in this update. New features allow you to set extra space before and after paragraphs, and bullets and numbering now have their own tab for easier distinction from text-handling features.

You can also embed Web pages directly into presentations. Instead of shooting a picture of a Web page and pasting the image, just insert a Web View, and you’ll have the actual page—and an Update Automatically option will make sure it’s always the latest view, assuming you have a network connection.

There are also six new shapes you can add to slides, including two different arrow styles, a diamond, floating “cartoon-style” quote bubble, and an octagon. This gives you 12 shapes to work with, and with full control over fill color or image, transparency, and line type, you can get quite creative.

You can also easily add text directly to an object; the previous version required adding a new text layer and positioning it on top of the existing object. Now a simple double-click on an object puts the text insertion point in the center of that object, and you just start typing.

Finally, although table handling was already one of Keynote’s strengths, it’s also been improved in this release. The new table tool offers easy creation of row and column headers, precise column and row sizing in pixels, a button to resize cells automatically as content changes, and a set of buttons to quickly select entire rows and columns.

Smoothing the Show

One area where Keynote trailed PowerPoint was in tools for presenters. The previous version could show your presentation on the projector while you watched a view with notes on your laptop’s screen. But that was it. As seen in the screenshot, the new Presenter Display option gives you complete control over what you see on your laptop’s screen. You can see some or all of the following: current and next slides, your notes, as well as a clock and a timer counting either elapsed or remaining time. You can even edit the layout of these objects on the laptop’s screen. If you give longer presentations, the ability to have your notes, a peek at the next slide, and feel for your timing available with a quick glance at the screen in an invaluable addition to Keynote.

Beyond Basic Presentations

The new version of Keynote has a few neat features that make it suitable for more than just standard “person talking to crowd” usage. First off, you can set any slideshow to automatically enter Play mode when it’s opened, and you can put it in loop mode, so it just repeats over and over. If you also set the presentation mode to Self-Playing, then the entire presentation will run without any user intervention—all builds and transitions occur without any intervention, with the timings that you set for them. But if you had them set to happen on a mouse click, then you’ll also have to set the two new top-level settings for Build and Transition delays; these timings will then take the place of the mouse click. When combined with Keynote’s amazing 3-D transitions and great handling of images and movies, you can create a self-playing photography portfolio, a display of your sketchwork, or collection of classic movie clips—all of which will just be shown to passersby without any intervention on their part.

The other cool new feature in Keynote is the ability to make anything a hyperlink. The inspector has a new Hyperlink section, as seen in the screenshot; you can hyperlink any text or object to an external webpage, to an email message, or to one of a number of slide options (previous, next, first, last, last viewed, or a specific slide number). You can even hyperlink to another Keynote presentation. Using these features together with a new Hyperlinks Only slideshow mode, you can build interactive presentations. For example, put your company’s product catalog into a hyperlinks only presentation, then load it up on an iMac in your lobby, and you’ve got a great way for visitors to pass the time while waiting for an appointment.

Sharing With Others

Presentations often need to be shared—attendees want a copy of your slides, you’d like to make your presentation available via the Web, or someone on a PC needs to edit your work. Keynote has always offered the ability to export to QuickTime, PDF, and PowerPoint, but the new release adds two more—Flash, for easy web display, and Images, which saves each slide as a separate image file (PNG, TIFF, or JPEG). In addition, a few annoying bugs from the original’s export tools have been fixed. PDF export now fully supports transparency, and embedded QuickTime movies no longer cause odd problems when exporting to QuickTime.

Wrap Up

Keynote was a strong presentation creation application in its 1.0 release. With the new version, it’s become an even stronger competitor to PowerPoint. From its seamless integration with iPhoto and iTunes to its greatly improved animation and slide timing features, the new version of Keynote looks like a winner.

Sidebar: Save the Leather and Sandstone

As noted in the Keynote 2 preview, the new version adds ten themes, but kills two (Sandstone and Leather Book) in the process. If you have the first version of Keynote, you can easily resurrect these themes from the dead.

In the Finder, control-click on the first version of Keynote and select Show Package Contents. In the new window that opens, navigate to Contents: Resources: Themes. Open a new Finder window, and navigate to the top-level Library: Application Support: Keynote: Themes. If you don’t see the Themes folder, just create a new folder in the Keynote folder, name it Themes, then open it. Make sure both the new and old Finder windows are visible. Hold down the command key, and in the first window you opened, click on the four themes we’re going to “save:”

07_Sandstone_8x6.kth

07_Standstone_10x7.kth

11_Leather Book_8x6.kth

11_Leather Book_10x7.kth

Release the command key, click and hold on any of the four highlighted items, press and hold the option key (which will force a copy of these files), and then drag and drop them into the new folder you created. If you’re doing it right, your screen should look something like this just before you drop the copies:

That’s it! The next time you launch the new Keynote, you’ll have 22 themes to choose from, with the two salvaged themes appearing at the end of the list.