Keynote

[actripxl]

Any body use Keynote yet? I would like to know what is it exactly. Im a Dentistry student and would like a good program to do my presentations like my thesis.

[Rower_CPU]

Have you read this page yet?

http://www.apple.com/keynote/

I've barely opened it twice, but it's got a very slick , powerful interface. I can't wait to actually start building my presentations. :)

[MacFan25]

Rower - do you have Keynote?

[Rower_CPU]

Originally posted by MacFan25
Rower - do you have Keynote?

Yup. Why?

[MacFan25]

I was wondering if it is better than PowerPoint.

Is it?

[Jaykay]

I have used keynote quite a bit and it seems very good. The built in themes arre good (very much like iDVD) and in general its very useful.

Though i have noticed that it lacks the sheer weight of number of features that powerpoint has. Lovely app though.

[MacFan25]

Okay, thanks.

[Rower_CPU]

Pretty much what Jaykay said.

Here's the way I look at it:

PowerPoint has more features, but they're less well implemented. Keynote has fewer but they're much more powerful/useful.

PowerPoint has more built-in clip art, but it's still friggin' MS clip art. Apple's built in clip art is high quality.

That's really all I can say right now. :)

[voicegy]

Originally posted by Rower_CPU
PowerPoint has more features, but they're less well implemented. Keynote has fewer but they're much more powerful/useful.

PowerPoint has more built-in clip art, but it's still friggin' MS clip art. Apple's built in clip art is high quality.


I've been using it for 3 weeks now, and I agree with the above. I love showing it off to people and then telling them it's NOT PowerPoint, it's Keynote and ONLY for the Mac.:)

In time, they'll add some minor updates, I'm sure. My only pet peeve for now is it not being able to automatically go through the presentation...I like the idea of talking and timing things while the presentation happily just moves forward with me not having to touch it, and I can do that in PP, but not Keynote...yet.

[wheezl]

I like the idea of talking and timing things while the presentation happily just moves forward with me not having to touch it, and I can do that in PP, but not Keynote...yet.


You could export to quicktime with a defined time / build on your slides. It would play, and you would not have to touch it.

Not sure if that would work out for you.. but it might :)

[DakotaGuy]

Okay Apple has confused me before, but this time takes the cake!

According to their website, you need at least a 500Mhz G3 or a G4 processor to run Keynote. I am VERY pleased how Keynote runs on my iMac G3 400Mhz. In contrast, they say you can run iMovie 3 on a 400Mhz G3 or higher, and it runs very poorly. After running the two programs, I find that Keynote is much easier and faster to run on a G3 then iMovie or even iPhoto. Where did Apple come up with these system requirements. I even have a friend that is a Tech Coordinator for a school in another state and he said even though they moved their iMac G3's to OSX they are staying with PowerPoint, because Keynote won't run well on the G3's according to Apple. And I thought they were targeting the education market.

Anyhow I like Keynote, but I still have a thing for PowerPoint after all these years. I will do my next presentation with Keynote and see how it goes. By the way has anyone actually tried to convert a Keynote presentation into PowerPoint? How well does it work? My school is mostly PC's so if I use Keynote I would have to convert a lot of the presentations to PowerPoint.

Last, where does Apple come up with these system recommendations? It seems like they are requiring too much to run Keynote and not enough to run iMovie. Just my observation. I am glad I took the gamble anyhow.

[shakespeare]

Originally posted by Abercrombieboy
has anyone actually tried to convert a Keynote presentation into PowerPoint? How well does it work?

Actually, it works very well: much better, in fact, than I expected. Apple found Microsoft equivalents for all their special features.

The only problem, of course, is that the PowerPoint versions are much, much less gorgeous. Keynote presentations are beautiful.

[gernb]

version 2 or 3 of this program will rock. version 1 sucks. it's a beta and it's missing a ton of key features. since no one was really expecting apple to release a presentation program (it was a major suprise at macworld) i don't get why they didn't wait until this program really had the full features it needs.

for example:

you can't time object animations

slide transitions only work going forward

there were myriad driver problems with ATI cards (now mostly resolved)

animations and effects tear the screen when using video mirroring (EVEN on cards with 64MB of VRAM

there's no light table / slide sorter view

no contextual menu during playback to jump to a specific slide

no mouse / pointer for use during playback so you can't highlight slides

and finally playback of embedded quicktime files is PATHETIC (perhaps 10 fps...even on dual 1.25 ghz machines) especially considering this is apple's own technology

don't get me wrong, the transparency and alpha channel effects are really cool and the program has potential...but i have no idea how they could have overlooked the basic features listed above.

any one care to chime in?

[Billicus]

Originally posted by Abercrombieboy
Okay Apple has confused me before, but this time takes the cake!

According to their website, you need at least a 500Mhz G3 or a G4 processor to run Keynote. I am VERY pleased how Keynote runs on my iMac G3 400Mhz. In contrast, they say you can run iMovie 3 on a 400Mhz G3 or higher, and it runs very poorly. After running the two programs, I find that Keynote is much easier and faster to run on a G3 then iMovie or even iPhoto. Where did Apple come up with these system requirements. I even have a friend that is a Tech Coordinator for a school in another state and he said even though they moved their iMac G3's to OSX they are staying with PowerPoint, because Keynote won't run well on the G3's according to Apple. And I thought they were targeting the education market.

Anyhow I like Keynote, but I still have a thing for PowerPoint after all these years. I will do my next presentation with Keynote and see how it goes. By the way has anyone actually tried to convert a Keynote presentation into PowerPoint? How well does it work? My school is mostly PC's so if I use Keynote I would have to convert a lot of the presentations to PowerPoint.

Last, where does Apple come up with these system recommendations? It seems like they are requiring too much to run Keynote and not enough to run iMovie. Just my observation. I am glad I took the gamble anyhow.

If you got it working on your iMac, I might just have to try doing so on my iMac 400.

[DakotaGuy]

Billicus:

Yes Keynote runs fine on my iMac DV400, much better then iMovie, it is not as quick and efficient as PowerPoint on this machine, but is completely usable. I even tried importing a quicktime movie into a slide and it all played just fine during a slideshow. The only thing I would imagine is it will take awhile on a G3 to load a big slide show, but I have loaded big slide shows before on old PC's and you just sit and wait and it works. I tried converting and loading a big PowerPoint, 68 slides with movies and full animation, and it took awhile, but once it was imported it played well and editing worked nicely.

gernb:

As a teacher I love presentation programs, and I will concur with you, Keynote is missing things. I played around this afternoon with PowerPoint v.X and also Keynote. At this time PowerPoint is much more flexible and offers a lot more options, but I would give Keynote a chance it will get better. I am guessing when they went to build this they used PowerPoint as a model. I still like PowerPoint. IMHO it is one of the better pieces of software along with Excel that MS offers.