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Keynote 2 features UPDATED
Posted by | Posted in General | Posted on 01-11-2005
Ken and Brian got a quick look at Keynote on the show floor today. Here’s a quick run down of some of the new features, along with some limitations and stuff that’s still missing:
Hyperlinks between slides are still there, and in fact Apple has a self running demo that’s basically a store catalog. This is now the perfect tool for kiosks. Along with that comes automation, and a new slide out shelf that lists ALL the builds, allowing you to change the order visually. You can even set one build to play off another, like making a headline build in, and a second later the sub head. You can also NAME your objects in this build list, so you can manage them better.
There’s a new function that lets you put a preview image of a web page on a slide, and when that slide comes up, you can have Keynote launch Safari and load the page live. The show pauses while you’re there and then you can return to Keynote by clicking its icon in the dock. The show will kick right back in.
Of course there are a bunch of new transitions and builds…and here’s something new that’ll make many folks happy. When you export to QT, text builds that run WHILE a movie is playing actually build correctly in the new QT movie. No more messed up presentations because the text ended up BEFORE the movie upon exporting.
Exporting to QT even keeps the hyperlinks in tact, so you can make a full on self running kiosk using only a QT movie now.
Shadows and transparency now work in PDFs! This is great news for many of you.
Shadows do NOT appear correctly in the Flash export, but transitions seemed to be pretty decent.
There’s a new Mask tool, which basically is a crop tool. It only works as a rectangle, and you still can’t move images you’ve placed inside a Keynote object, so there’s room to grow here. I suggested to the Apple guy in the booth that Apple give us a key combo that lets us move images around inside an object. This would give us a powerful masking system inside the app,
There’s a new Master slide function called Object drop zone (I think that’s it). Basically it allows theme builders to designate a spot for objects to land when dragged onto a slide. So, if you have a certain place you want a photo to be snapped to when a user drops it, you can do that. I suppose you could snap it to over a photo cutout, but even charts and other object snap to it if they’re the first thing to hit the slide. Not sure how useful this is, but time will tell.
The text panel is pretty much the same, though the bullets area now has its own sub pane.
There’s a new Media palette that taps into the iLife stuff. No more visiting iPhoto to get images, now you can drag one from a small thumbnail panel in the palette. Drag a photo in, and then apply a mask to it and you’ve got a nicely cropped image in a second or so.
There’s a new audio soundtrack option that lets you designate an audio file to play through the show. Not sure yet if this will cue a whole playlist or not.
New image exporter does Tiff, Jpeg and PNG
The QT export looks the same. I suggested they give us 2 things. 1. The option to tag the movie to always play full screen, and 2. the option to turn ON the controller.
We got a look at a few of the themes. Typical good Apple Quality, but there’s always room to grow. I’ll be anxious to open my themes in it to see how they do.
There’s still no way to add multiple empty text containers on a master slide. It’s still just Title and Body, so no new type of theme will be coming from us for a while. This also means there’s still no two column bullet solution.
There’s a new pop-up in the menu where the old Themes button was. It brings up a long list of the themes by thumbnail, so you don’t have to visit the themes window. The theme window still looks the same though.
There’s a new document area on the inspector, and they’ve moved the slide size to that. Looks like there are a bunch of presets, including 640×480 (which is what the iPod photo uses). We did a test and Keynote correctly resized a WHOLE slide when we changed resolutions. This is going to be GREAT for Theme builders wanting to make several sizes.
There are several kinds of Hyperlinks. They are Another slide, another Keynote preso (and if you have that second preso open, the presentation never stops, so you never see the Mac screen appear), a Safari link or you can exit the show.
There are several new objects now, but still no Bezier tool. Still, it’s better than what we had before.
That’s all my brain can handle right now. Stay tuned for more updates as the week progresses.
Edit: We remembered a few more things. There’s still no HTML export to be found. We asked and you DO have use of the cursor during the show, which hopefully means Flash and VR interactivity. We’re hoping that mouse clicks work here, and it makes sense since the demo we say used Apple made hyperlinks that required a mouse click to trigger. This didn’t advance the slide, so this looks good for Flash and QT VR users. We’lll post another story later as we find out more info.
Edit 2: I’ve just found out that Keynote 2 still doesn’t support group scaling and group shadows, two things I was REALLY hoping would be in there. They DID manage to add a text larger-smaller key combo, which fixes a totally annoying ommission from Keynote 1. I also learned that the presenter mode is completely customizable. You can turn on and off all the elements and move them around to lay out the screen to your taste. That beats the PPT 2004 solution in my book.
Did Apple give any clue as to WHY they bundled Keynote 2 with iWork???? thanks
I should have said WHY did they bundle Keynote 2 with a word processing program Pages?? There must have been a reason.
I think it’s because they work together so well. Pages isn’t just a word processor, it’s a full page layout app, and you can copy and paste EVERYTHING from Keynote into it. That includes charts, etc. I can see people making matching Keynote and Pages themes. Maybe this’ll keep folks from trying to use Keynote as a page layout app
What about the price? If the only way to get Keynote 2.0 is to spend $79 on iWork, this is very, very bad. I don’t want another Word Processor; and I don’t want to spend 80% of what I spent originally spend to get the updated features.
This is all part of a disturbing trend from Apple — users of iPhoto are stuck with old, slow version unless they spend $79 to purchase the iLife suite — a group of programs that I have little use for.
Bottom line: Apple should provide a more reasonable method to upgrade previous versions of applications that are now “bundled,
Although you don’t mention it, can you confirm that Keynote 2.0 lets you apply builds and transitions to the master slides?
Thanks Brian. I thought that Pages was maybe just a low-level substitute for MS Word..
I wonder if Pages can be used to make awesome handouts for Keynote prezzies.
Thanks for the outstanding reports! Great to have you there ‘elbowing’ Apple!
Waiting to hear (no pun intended?) about sounds – between slides, continuous, etc. Tell us more about having the cursor used and now visible – an option?, particular slides? Pages sounds interesting, also!
Thanks for the report, guys! Can someone explore the Flash export in more detail, and perhaps even publish a sample file of the output? It’s the one thing I was really hanging out for in Keynote 1 – I’m so glad it’s been added!
“Maybe this’ll keep folks from trying to use Keynote as a page layout app”
Hey… I thought I was the only one who did that!!!
“Maybe this’ll keep folks from trying to use Keynote as a page layout appâ€Â
No no no… that’s what Excel is for…
Can you explain more about builds — like bullet points that fade out automatically? Is this present?
I also wonder if they have done anything about printing — my presentations in Keynote 1.1 take forever to print (with my org’s own custom JPEG background image).
Are hyperlinks maintained in PDF output?
I’m also interested in builds/transitions on the master slides.
And is there any way to visually see which transitions are applied between slides … or which slides have a custom transition, beyond one that might be part of the default master slide, applied to them?
I’m wondering if there are any possibilities of dual video out for the Mac mini, as that would make a nice presentation system to leave in conference rooms or classrooms.
I’d also like to know if there are ways to view other presentation files from within the presenter mode. Along with hyperlinks between presentations, the addition of having a presentation browser to pull up other presentation files would make a lot of sense in many situations — marketing presentations, church projector presentations, etc. The ideal would be to have a way to select a specific slide or starting point in a separate presentation file while within the presentation mode of Keynote, and from the current slide in the current presentation, move to that new selection — without dropping back to the Mac OS X interface.
Does Keynote 2 address the problems 1 had with handling and controlling Movies in presentations.
hello Folks, I really wonder about the hardware-necessities for Keynote 2. Will iot properly run on my G3 800 Mhz iBook (640 Ram)?
It says G3 500 Mhz or G4, G5 (Powerbook G4 recommended).
Greetings from ol’ europe
Rolf
What ABOUT the price. For less than any PowerPoint upgrade you get eight new themes, new cool transitions and features, and what looks like a pretty good page layout app thrown in for free. since the original Keynote already cost $100+ less than PowerPoint, I think our glass is WAY more than half-full.
A brief comment about the price. There are a number of PowerPoint (PC) to Flash utilities that cost $150 to $600. The $79 price is justified in my mind just by the ability to export Keynote to Flash. The rest of the additional Keynote features and Pages are a huge bonus.
Brian – I am interested in as much information about Keynote’s ability to export to Flash as you can find. The “gold standards” for PowerPoint to Flash converters are Breeze and Articulate. If you are familiar with either or both of those, you might comare/contrast their capabilities with Keynotes. Thanks for your help. Wish I was in San Francisco!
I’ll try. I DO know according to Ken’s tests it DOES hold all the interactivity, but you lose the shadows (they go to a solid edge, no softness there. Also, you can make any size slide and then export that as Flash. That means you could make some cool odd shaped web presentations with it. Ken’s planning on posting more to the MW blog. I’ll be refacing it so it’s more like a blog for the whole week, not just the Keynote.
I’m pretty sure they will, but do version-1 templates work as expected in version 2? I’d like to keep using the templates I’ve bought and created/modified, while I also would like to use the new features!
First, many many thanks for keeping us updated! Apple says ILife and Keynote are integrated. But it just seems like iLife is integrated into Keynote and not the other way around. I like the iPhoto feature that allows me to build a homepage of a photo album with one click and I want to do that with Keynote. Can I import Keynote slides into iPhoto? I want to give a lecture with Keynote, then post the slides for students with one click. Thanks.
Did you have a chance to audition the presenter tools? Are they changed from 1.1? Power Point’s presentation mode is superior to Keynote 1.1 in many ways ie. you can project the pointer onto th audience’s display with PowerPoint but not Keynote1.1.
Jacqueline: if you want to post slides for your students, saving as a PDF is probably the best way. It will compress text and graphics for you, unlike an iPhoto slide.
Brain, if you or Ken could check and see is a graph created in Keynote2 can be pasted in Pages while retaining all of its textures, fills and values, that would be great.
And the same thing about a block of bulleted text. We may be able to see how closely the XML data is duplicated in the two programs this way…
I watched them copy and paste a chart, and as far as I know you can copy/paste anything between them. The XML is nearly the same I’d think. I learned yesterday that you can now put text INSIDE a shape in Keynote, which is handy. You can also now add a margin to regular text boxes, so if you needed a stroked box with text in the center, you can control how much space is between the text and the frame.
Has the font management extended to allow inclusion of equations and the like in Keynote 2 or do you have to stay with the LaTex solution?
You know, I was going to ask you to see if Keynote now supports the various Typography Glyph Variants which you can access through the lower gear button on the lower left of the Font Panel (that is displayed when you select Fonts in the toolbar)
It’s irrelevant now, though, since it appears Apple has secretly updated that little thing in one of the recent System upgrades…
If you wonder why it is useful or important, create a text box in Keynote and change the font to Zapfino. Type something and select the text. Using the gear menu, choose Typography and click the arrow near Glyph variants. Choose some of the different variants and watch your text become more personalized. T’s can now have flourishes that mimic actual calligraphy. g’s can have all sorts of fancy tails, a’s can have nifty closings and S’s can look cooler.
Kudos to the Apple team for bringing this to the current version of Keynote. (It wasn’t there last time I looked.)
Did you note the presenter’s screen and whether the presenter can see builds, or does the presenter see the entire slide. PowerPoints presenter screen is very nice in this respect.
Also, did you notice whether it is as sluggish as Keynote 1. I like Keynote, but PowerPoint is much snappier and development time is much faster.
Has anyone tested to ensure that transparent video files (like from live type) still work with keynote2 and with apples new quicktime 7?
My own input is that apple should consider integrating live type with keynote (perhaps calling it “keynote pro”). And selling it for a higher price.
Lastly has anyone tested keynote2 and all it’s features on the mini-mac? (Transparent video & such?) My suspicion is with DV quality videos it will bog down signicantly.
Is there a laptop style locking port on the Mac Mini?
Though I know it is any entry machine is there any possibility of getting more video memory and more regular memory as an option.
I do a couple of Mac centric conferences and would consider buying if video memory was 64mb and regular memory could be kicked up to 1 gig.
Thanks for the great info….
I’ve wanted to use Keynote at Church for songs, but what stopped me was that transitions only worked if you stepped sequentially through the slides. Brian, do know if Keynote 2 will do transitions when you jump randomly between slides? Do you think Keynote 2 can be used in place of SundayPlus?
Another question…. Did apple make it possible for a video file to run continously on a master slide (like a digital juice Jumpback). As the foreground information changes on the next slide?
As in using a simple fade-in & out? Or a cut? anything that prevents the video file from stopping.
Dave Sawyer
Has anyone asked if the new iWork software is now going to make Keynote 2 (and Pages) serialized product(s)? In other words, will we have to buy separate packages of iWork for EVERY computer we want to use keynote and/or pages on. That would mean I would have to buy iWork 3 times! One for my home, office and laptop. If iWork has become serialized, the $79 iWork seems like a great price, until you want to make it versatile. Or will it be like MS Office and allow us to install it on just one desktop and one laptop? That would still mean I would have to buy at least two boxes? (Will this be the case for iLife 05, too?)
Hearing that they haven’t added multiple bullet boxes or grouped resizing is a huge dissapointment and really a head scratcher. For me, without these two features, Keynote is unusable.
From your comments Brian, it sounds like you see these as very important as well. Can we start a petition to get these features added? If the past history of Keynote upgrades is a guide, we won’t see any improvements for a long time. Maybe if we voice our opinions, we can see these features added.
Does anyone know if with Embeded Quicktime movies in the interactive QuickTime mode, can you pause and rewind the movies, and or have access to volume control?
Thanks,
Greg
Can you resize fonts with control-shift-<> yet? Font management sure is a pain in the butt in the current version. I noticed on Apple’s site that they still have fonts separate from the inspector for some incomprehensible reason.
Nevermind, I just saw it in your notes. Lack of scaling sucks though.
great stuff thank you. do you know whether Keynote 2 has anything that comes close to matching PowerPoint’s “Motions” tab for doing interesting things to move objects and text around a slide?
You can’t do motion paths (I guess PPT 2003 can do this), but the effects you can do are much cool than those in the standard PPT. I won’t have to take trips to LiveType so often now.
Does K.2 allow for image contrast and brightness adjustment within the program, as PPT does?
Nope, but since iPhoto has it, and you can easily drag photos from iphoto (or the Media palette), then I figure they’re waiting for Tiger to put that in.
Any improvments for using K2 with Imovie?
I am still challenged by the QT export feature and the lack of text quality in the DV format. K2 has the potential for beign an awsome animation tool,
and a real companion to Imovie/Finalcut
read the tutorial on Final Cut Pro on this site. You MUST remember that DV is ALWAYS a lower quality than a laptop screen, and all of Apple video apps display stuff as a reference, not at full quality. You have to connect a TV set to your camcorder and then to the mac to see it at full TV res while editing. This misunderstanding of DV by most people is the #1 reason Apple left out 1 click DVD authoring from Keynote…they would have had a flood of people complaining that it doesn’t look as good as it did in Keynote…well, it never will (lets hope the HD DVD spec is at least closer).
I have to agree with Allen – the inability to put a second bulleted text box on a slide is fundamental functionality and its absence in Keynote (especially Keynote 2) is incomprehensible to me.
Keynote’s eye candy is a tremendous advanatage over PPT in terms of engaging the audience, but I also have to be able to actually communicate my message effectively too. I commonly have lists of items to show and breaking them up onto multiple slides is not effective, and ruins the rhythm of the presentation.
Why does everyone seem to be locked into using the Keynote Bullet system? I’ve done lists like the one’s you’re talking about, and I just added my own numbers to the list, and used the tab settings to give me dropped paragraphs. Or, if I want fancy bullets, I’ll do a bunch of duping and group a bullet with a text box, a bullet with a text box, etc. Overall, I don’t see a HUGE issue unless you’re somehow in love with the Keynote bullets. Heck, try Option-8 and resize just that first character, at least it’s a decent work around
Hi from Spain, I have a simple question: how work the “old” themes of K1.1 and the “image library” in K2.
In Spain nobody had make a good prerelease of K2, and in USA forums tells the K2 users than two things, don`t work as well as they are customary in K1.1.
Please tell me if it`s true or false, because a have downloaded and payed more, more themes of Keynoteuser, KeynoteHQ,
Keynote Theme Park, Jumsoft, Keynote Gallery, Keynote Pro and My Keynotes Themes, about 500$ or more, and iWork cost 99$.
If this problems haven´t a SIMPLE solution I stay in K1.1
Regards from Spain, and please “put a candle in my way”
Keynote 2 sees your old themes. I’m working on a script to easily open the old Image Library and Samples folders that Keynote 1 used. They are still there, you just have to dig for them to get the stuff out of them. All your purchased themes will show up in Keynote 2 though, so don’t worry.
Thanks Brian. Nice all yourn work and your Themes. Are you working in Metal?
It appears that Keynote still does not offer a true slide sorted view (35mm style).
Is that correct and did they offer any views on this need?
Hi Keynote gurus,
Would anyone be willing to share any pointers on how to import a Flash file or a DVD into a Keynote presentation?
Thank you in advance.
Cheers,
Joao