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Keynote ’08 thoughts
Posted by | Posted in Blog | Posted on 08-10-2007
I’ve been tinkering with Keynote ’08 (by the way, the app itself is tagged as Keynote 4 in the about box) and it’s a love hate thing all over again (mostly love).
The good things are real time savers for Theme makers like myself. If most of your photo cutouts are rectangular, the new media Place holder function, combined with the new Photo Frames stoke function, are a complete replacement for the old photo cutout system. Heck, you can even make odd shaped placeholders, as long as you don’t want a frame around them. The only real need for photo cutouts now is if you want to make odd shaped cutouts with dressing or frames around them.
My only complaint with this new system is that you can’t use an image placeholder that’s grouped. I have a photo frame that resembles a slide, and I want the photo to sit behind it, and always move with it. That just won’t work with this system, so in my new theme, I’ll have to include instructions on how to use this image frame.
This brings me to another complaint…if you create your own custom Photo frame for use inside Keynote, it has to be installed inside the Keynote app itself. The drawback is, no one else will have that frame, and if they open your .key file, the frame will just be missing from around the photo. I’m hoping at some point Apple sees fit to notice when there are 3rd party frames installed and give you the option to move them into the .key file. When that file is opened on a new machine, Keynote would display it properly.
Another discovery I made just a few minutes ago is with the custom Keynote shapes many of us have been using in our themes lately. In Keynote 2 and 3, if you had a custom Keynote shape with a hole in it, and you chose to make it editable, the hole would go away, or the shape would freak out and get all messed up. Now, though you can’t create a shape with a hole in it, you can EDIT a shape with a hole in it, and the hole stays intact. This is a huge step forward in functionality, because it allows the end user to edit shapes without breaking them.
Anyway, we’ll be posting more reviews and other stuff over the coming days as we really tear into Keynote ’08.
Hi Brian,
Just a note about a simple trick I found.
One of my “love-Hate” things about Keynote is the fact that you can’t drag photos into a smart build. You have to go through Media browser – like it or not. But I hate I iPhoto and I don’t want to go through the process of opening the app, dragging photos into it, leaving it open and taking ram or ram disk for basically nothing.
But the media browser also looks for photobooth. I just made an alias of the photobooth folder, placed it on my desktop with the name : to keynote. Now I take the files in batch, drop them on the alias and they are immediately available in the media browser. I then drag them in batch in the smart build “container”.
Share that if you find that useful.
Andre (keynote junkie since version 1)
I use Aperture, so I don’t have issues using the media browser, but that’s a nice trick.
But just so you know, you CAN paste images into the HUD bin for a smart build, because I just tried it and it worked
Also, you can grab an image from the finder and drop it into the smart build HUD bin also, but you have to drop it onto the “Drop image here” icon.
That might end up being easier for you since it leaves out the extra steps you’re doing.
Wow! Never been happier to see one of my tricks rendered obsolete!!!
Tried it with multiple images at a time and worked!
Yeah, yet again, Apple has shown me that Keynote is a heck of a lot deeper than it looks. While they’ve still left off a lot of features we wanted, there’s a TON of little details in there that make me smile.
Like the long awaited 3D grow transition with charts ! Never read about that anywhere.
Yeah, I found that yesterday. There are other little things I haven’t written about yet, but you can find a few goodies in my blog, which I posted to this morning.
FYI – missing feature :
The “distribute rows evenly” command is gone fronm the pop-up menu. Still buried in format/table/… but much less convenient. – reported that to Apple.
I just watched the media event where Jobs announced iWork 08, and it seems he kept one nice text animation to himself (for now). When the prices for iLife and iWork come on, it’s this nice starglow effect. Much more sublte and classy than the sparkle effect.
One thing I fount in K08 that has me really excited is that you can apply a photoframe to a Quicktime movie, AND use the new action animations (except opacity) while the movie is playing! I just tried it with a native DV clip and it played smoothly on my original MacBook Pro. I’m just excited to have A to B animation. My one gripe is that move and rotate have ease in and out, and scale does not, so if you move and scale at the same time, it looks like it does this wierd s-curve in 3d space.
Hello
I use a lot of animated gif from Digital Juice Presenter’s toolkit. I use the transparent gif most of the time. Boy , was I surprised to see a white backgrond around the animation when I opened my prensentation with Keynote ’08. I must do something wrong ! Apple CANNOT have ovelooked this.
Can anybody help ?
I have the Presenter’s Toolkit, and I think all that stuff can be exported as a QT movie using the PNG or Animation codecs. See this thread on the DJ forums where I posted how to make them work in Keynote:
http://www.digitaljuice.com/community_forums/tm.asp?m=2788&mpage=1&key=
my first comment after the original post is the one that has the details.
Thanks
And what about the gif from animation factory ? Same things ?
Gifs won’t work right now in Keynote 08. If you can export as QT, that will work, otherwise you’re out of luck till Apple fixes it.
Thanks !!!
Brian,
I was excited about the new version of Keynote… until I found out they still don’t allow a music clip to span the entire presentation. I help at a church doing sound and running the media stuff and I love Keynote, but this is just crazy that I can’t do in Keynote what I’m forced to have to use Power Point for, is there no way to get a song to play the entire presentation?
you’ve been able to use a playlist or song to span the whole preso for a while now, what you still can’t do is span just a FEW slides with music.
Dig the “smart builds”, but my biggest complaint is that I haven’t found any way to interrupt a smart build playing without exiting the preso. I have a big rotating set of images I’d like to cycle continuously until I hit the “next slide” key, but can’t do that with Smart build. It just goes and a goes ’till it’s done. THEN I can advance the slides if I want.
Am I missing something?
Brian,
thanks, yes I finally saw that, I guess it helps to click on “all” the tabs, the next question I have is this:
I live in a Windows world at work, however I’m use a Mac at home. I don’t have a laptop but I am preparing a presentation to give at work and I’d like to do it on Keynote, and without bringing my box into work to connect to the screen what is my options for exporting my keynote to use with my 5G iPod? Is there a good sucess in this?
Is there a way to make somethings opacity change over time, or can I have a photo change from B/W to color over time?