When I started Keynoteuser.com it was simply a single page with Keynote tips and thoughts on it. Then I expanded it into an entire site, and it was all html (check out an archive from early 2003). When I went to a news format, I was literally copying the previous story, pasting it, editing it and posting the new page. Forget archives, this was all hand done. It took way too much time and got old pretty fast. The site went through a few redesigns after this (see the main archive page if you want to look at the different design changes ) but it was still all manually done. Then right before Macworld 2005 I decided to relaunch it. I had done so much work to the site that I didn’t want to start from scratch, but I knew I needed the news system to be automatic. That’s when I discovered WordPress.

I got the WordPress engine up and running in a /news/ folder but didn’t want to use it for the whole site. I think maybe back then it didn’t have the Pages function, and most sample WP sites didn’t even have nav bars. It was meant for blogging, so it didn’t really need all that stuff. Now the problem was, how do I get the news onto the front page? It turns out that WordPress is pretty flexible. The main stories are displayed using a block of code called “the loop.” I found that you could stick the loop on ANY page, as long as that page had a bit of extra code in the header that pointed to the main WP directory.

So the new Keynoteuser.com site was launched from the press room at Macworld that year. It didn’t look all that different from the version before it, but the WP loop replaced the main body on the front page (if you look in the archives, you can see that after 20th, the nav bar changed, a new ad block appeared at the top of the page, and the news articles show “posted by” in them). Ken and I could finally log into a web admin and post stories. We still had to ftp images up and manually link them. Either WP was still messy in that regard, or I didn’t really understand how it handled image uploads, but we still had to do that part manually and enter the image url in the code of the story. Over the years I updated the WordPress engine, and manually edited the side bars on the front of the site.

More recently I installed a plug-in from PRMac that actually creates new story drafts from press releases. It doesn’t this completely on its own without me having to even click anything. All I have to do is go in and delete the drafts we’ll never publish from the list. Then I clean up the stories we want to publish and click the Publish button. It makes running stories SO much easier, and when it’s easy for us, we actually update the site more often.

Anyway, jump to last week when I took the new site live. If you remember, the WP engine was sitting in the /news/ directory. If I was going to keep it there, all my new WP pages would be at site/news/pagename which looks weird to me. I searched and found a way to stick a special htaccess file in the /news/ folder that would simply redirect anything with /news/ in the url to the the correct url without /news/ in it. Sweeeet. So, the next step was to find the right look for the site. I looked and looked and looked and didn’t like anything out there.

One day I was looking at a friends brand new blog (www.gabetaviano.com) and I commented that I liked the theme he was using. He said it was a pre-made theme (which I usually start with anyway) and I went to the site to see what else they had (hoping I’d find a free one). Sure enough, they had this nice woodgrain look called UltraWood. Now, I know some of you are thinking…”yeah, but woodgrain!??” and I’m right there with you. But this is a Keynote site, not my company site. Having the site sort of look like a page sitting on the Keynote podium is kind of cool (in my opinion) so I decided to give it a shot. Thankfully, WordPress has a little known preview feature where you can view your pages in the new theme without having to turn it on.

As soon as I saw the preview I knew this was the right one. No more ugly blue, no more endless nested tables. A real WP header bar with links to WP pages with my content grafted onto them. All the goodies that come with WP wrapped in a nifty Keynoteish theme. So I spent a few hours tweaking the theme and redoing my Keynote Themes landing page. I never did get time to redo each theme sales page, so those are pop-ups. I’m not too worried, as I release new themes, they’ll get the royal treatment anyway.

So, on Jan 30th I carefully removed all the old pages from the server and quickly moved everything from the /news/ folder up a level. Then I turned on the new theme and the site was live. After that I installed the htaccess file and tested it. It worked, so I knew all the old links to my site would still work (yeah!). Then I turned on the Keynote Themes page and tested it, and turned on the Resources page (which is mostly just an updated version of the old Links page). The last step was to upgrade WordPress to 2.7, which went off without a hitch since nothing in the main core had been hacked with this new version of the site (the only modified files are in the template itself).

Overall, I can’t believe how smooth the transition went. Since I wasn’t doing anything to the database, the main news engine was still all there, and even though many of the story images were linked to the old /news/ directory, the htaccess file fixed that (a benefit I wasn’t expecting). Once the transition was complete, I focused on the little tweaks. Things like not showing the blog category on the front page and adding it to the nav bar. I also turned off the default “Read More” buttons since we’re using a special tag in the article itself to designate the break, and that tag inserts the “Read the rest of this article” link instead.

I also modified the category and archives pages so that they appear in more of a list view and found a plugin so that I could force them to show more than 6 entires per page (which is what the front page is set to). Then yesterday I found the trick to making the blog page (which is simply a category page) show up the way the front page shows up, and NOT as a list view like the other category pages. I figured, if you’re going to the blog page, you want to read not search through a list of headlines.

I also turned off the automatic ad block that came with the theme and installed my own ads to give me more control, and then I added an Amazon favorites block at the bottom of the side bar (buying through our amazon links helps us out). I’ll probably keep tweaking the site and adjusting the ads till they look good. I don’t want an annoying ad block in the side bar, but I do need to keep the site bringing in something as it helps pay the bills.

I’m also still working on a decent download manager. I really want to get the freebies back up and running, but I don’t want to have to hand code the downloads page every time I add something. There’s a free download manager for WordPress, but it looks terrible if I simply turn it on, so I’ve got to learn how to customize it before it goes live.

I’ll be trying my best to start posting more tips and tutorials (I’m finally working on a tutorial on how to make a custom theme. It won’t go into all the details, but it will help you get a basic, custom theme created. Most of my tutorials in the past haven’t fully covered all the steps, and I’ve seen people really get confused when it came to what they’re supposed to edit to actually make the theme work properly.

So there you have it. The history and progress of Keynoteuser.com. I hope you enjoy the new site, and don’t forget to share it with your Keynote using friends and colleagues. I’m always surprised when I hear from people who have no idea this site exists.

Also, because of the way the OLD site is made, every old page has a header on it. Instead of going through and editing every header, I simply added links to the new page from each Old main section, so if you land on an old section, you can easily get to the new section. Eventually ALL the sections will be WordPress pages except the front page of the site, so it will all be searchable and dynamic.

You’ll see other new things over the next month or so. I want to add a wordpress downloads page, so that the downloads are tracked. Right now that portion of the site is simply a hacked together HTML page. I also plan on dumping the old reviews into the wordpress system (and maybe removing the really old ones) and making that a category listing also.

I had originally planned to move the site to Joomla, and I may still do that, but for now, it’s staying as a WordPress/HTML site. Eventually I’ll update the front page to a more modern look and get some of the side bar boxes automated with wordpress widgets (If I can get that working).

The last new item will really keep the site fresh. I joined the PRMac site and installed their news plugin into our site. That means I get press releases automatically, and they go into the drafts folder of the site. Now I can simply double check one, add an image to it and post it. That means you’ll finally see decent news at decent intervals on the site.

Thanks for sticking with us through all the dead times, we hope to not repeat that again!

This year has been a whirlwind, boot in good and bad ways. The early part of the year saw a great boost in sales with the release of PowerBlue, and my Mac consulting business was doing great. We did so well that I decided to replace my badly aging machines (My main production machine was a Dual 867) with some new hardware. I’m now the proud owner of a 17″ MacBook Pro and an 8 core Mac Pro tower. That’s the good news.

The bad news is consulting dropped way off, and I manage to get any other themes out this year except Galleria, which is more geared toward showing off photos and less of a general business theme. So, I’ve been really busy retooling PowerBlue for Keynote 08 (and adding iPod and HD sizes to it) and doing lots of Joomla based web development. This is going to be a good thing in the long run, but it’s pulled me in so many directions that my head is swimming most days (You try doing on site mac consulting, AND Keynote theme creation AND web development all in one day!). Anyway, the PowerBlue 08 layouts are now complete (short of a few look through’s for mistakes) and all I have to do now is update the extras, build the installer and update the web page.

The PowerBlue upgrade should be reasonably prices (around $10 I think) and the whole package still won’t cost much more than Frames does now (there’s another theme that’s due for an overhaul in 08).

The other bad news is that I won’t make it to Macworld yet again. At this point I’m not sure if Ken will make it, but he usually finds a way to get out there.

Anyway, I’d like to thank all of you who bought themes from the site over the years, you’ve kept me going when things get tight, and you’ll keep me going on into the future. Thanks!

Enter Joomla. I’m currently redesigning the entire site in Joomla and it’s going to make this current site look well, as bad as it always has been. No more wacked out margins, no more pasted in html pages. It will be one unified, dynamic, searchable site. The old site won’t go away completely though, the news portion of it (the wordpress part) will be stripped down and placed inside what Joomla calls a wrapper. This means, if someone follows an old link, or if you want to look for an old story, you’ll simply hit the link for the old news and it will load inside a frame in the new site. Nice and tidy.

Anyway, I’ve been chugging away at the Galleria theme and working on the new site along side it. The site is far from done, but I have posted a small screen shot so you can get an idea of how it looks so far.

I’m toying with turning on the user registration system and offering some tutorials and even discounts to registered users, so if you think that’s a cool idea, post a comment here and tell me!

Galleria

There’s a movie linked there, but it only really works if you let it completely load before attempting to watch it (it gets stuck reloading until it fully loads).

Look for a real page on our site and a real press release on Monday.

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.

I’m currently working on an ipod/dvd version of PowerBlue. The reason this would be a different theme than the standard is that it will be tailored for TV (and to a lesser extent, the iPod). Many tv’s have overscan (unless you’ve gone HD) and people have quickly realized that with a normal theme, they lose a lot of info around the edges of their slides when viewing a DVD presentation on a regular TV set. This version of PowerBlue will take care of that. It will also be tweaked for TV colors with things like 10% black added to the white text to tone it down for tv viewing with less flicker (white is especially bad on a regular TV set).

I’m also working on a complete redesign of the “portfolio” themes from Keynote Gallery. I basically started with the original theme as an inspiration, but the final will be a vastly different. It will also be more of a niche theme, made mostly for presenting photos (but it will contain bullet and other standard layouts, just in case folks want to use it for presentations). I’ve also got a chunk of Frames 2 done, but it’s not anywhere near being ready for a release.

Past that, the only other things on the table are more tutorials for the site. I have a TON of ideas, I just need to force myself to sit down and write them out (complete with screen shots).

You’ve probably read some well written reviews by some highly respected members of the tech community and I’d basically agree with them on all points EXCEPT for the constant droning of complaints about EDGE. It almost seems that, in order to appear “fair and balanced”, a reviewer has to make mention of the dreadfully slow EDGE network. Is it broadband? No. Is it 3G? No. But what it IS is the “internet” wherever you get a connection. No doubt faster is always better, but when I want to look up the review of a DVD or game before I buy it, I’ll wait a minute. Reader reviews of just about any consumer product is less than a minute away. You can get the locations of nearby stores, the phone number and web site OF those stores and directions on how to get there. I’m also not saying that this couldn’t be done on other phones (I’ve done it with a Blackberry Pearl). But, I can say with much certainty that the way it’s integrated on the iPhone means that users are more likely to figure out how to access all this info and will utilize it (a company that wants to do well this Christmas will be setting up an “iPhone” domain fairly soon!). These are things that outweigh the “speed” concerns of the network because even if it takes two minutes to access your information, that still saves you a trip home to your computer which would take MUCH longer.

Also, one other thing that I haven’t heard, but I think needs to be said, this thing gets warm. Not sure if there’s a difference between the 4G and 8G versions (we have the 8G), but you’re likely to feel a warm sensation while using this phone. It’s not “omg! MacBook Pro burn my lap!” warm, but still one of those things that I feel worthy of mentioning (which is why I’m mentioning it). Also, my last phone was a small plastic blackberry that I never noticed any warmth from, so maybe higher end and 3G users are used to this heat.

Some of our questions were answered by other reviews that came out in the remaining time before the iPhone was released, but we wanted to verify with an actual shipping version before we set these down in stone. Here, then, are the answers to the questions we had.

The 30-pin connection

1) USB Camera Connector – NOT SUPPORTED
2) External Mic (Belkin Tune Talk Stereo) – NOT SUPPORTED
3) Video output – NOT SUPPORTED
while we’re on the subject,
FM Remote – NOT SUPPORTED

So it looks like only audio out is currently supported via the dock connector.

Nice to Know’s
4) iPhone “attract” mode – NO
But, this didn’t appear until the iPod with video, so it’s not surprising that this version can’t do this yet.

5) Enhanced museum mode – NO
Again, this wasn’t in the first version of the iPod and was last updated in 2006, so perhaps this is something we may see in the future?

6) What kind of reading interface?
The “reading interface” appears to be via PDF’s and Notes that you enter on the phone. However, you can’t write something on the computer and have it transfer over AND you can’t get those notes off of the iPhone unless you email them to yourself. Same with PDF’s, you can’t just save a PDF to the phone and then open it.

7) Audio circuitry
We’re still waiting for more details on this one. Some sites have speculated about the chipset, but until this is settled, we won’t know what sound generation it’s capable of. What we CAN tell from the ringtoes, though, is that it’s audibly pleasing.

For the Keynoter in all of us

What can the iPhone do with .key files? – NOTHING
Since .key files look like folders to the internet, Mail .zips your .key files when you send them. Well, that .key file can’t be unzipped on the iPhone. Because Office files are flat data, they don’t have this problem. So, f you want to look at your presentation or Pages files on the iPhone, you’ll have to export as an Office format before mailing it.

9) QuickTime files
If your movie has audio and video supported by the iPhone specifications and maybe a chapter track, then you should be fine. However, interactive Keynote exports have more than that and these extra tracks aren’t supported. So, no creation of interactive displays with QuickTime… at least for now. I’ve got MY fingers crossed…

10) Slideshow transitions
The iPhone has these transitions. It defaults to “Dissolve” but also includes Cube, Ripple, Wipe Across and Wipe Down. Clearly a subset of the large number of iPod transitions, but at least Ripple is new and looks as good as it does on your computer.

Seems like most of the above is a “No” but, who knows? Maybe some of it is a “not yet” and, with the ability of the iPhone to be updated I’ll be waiting and checking to see what develops!

The 30-pin connection
All 30-pin connectors SHOULD be made equal, but some devices have not carried forward all the functionality you’d expect. Three things that we would really like to see are:

1) USB Camera Connector
Will the current one be recognized in the same way and store the images locally? As an added bit of coolness, will you be able to preview/rate images on the iPhone as you can’t currently preview with iPods.

2) External Mics
The iPhone has a mic and there’s no HD noise to be concerned about, but if you’ve already got a good quality 30-pin connector solution (some even in stereo) then you won’t want to make that quality step back. It’d be nice to know if there’s a way to delete recordings you don’t want to keep(ala the Visual Voicemail feature).

3) Video output
This has been a question I’ve had since Macworld. In a pinch, when all else has failed, you’re still able to use your iPod to get a presentation across. Current solutions use output from the headphone jack and from the 30-pin connector. I haven’t seen an image of the connector, only of the earbuds. If it connects through the 30-pin connector like the FM Remote, then the headphone port may work as it does currently. The new headphones also include a mic and some control hardware though. So, if that signal is going in through the headphone connection, that may mean the iPod video cable may not work with it.

Nice to Know’s
These are things that rank slightly above curiosities. Those little things that some corner of the iPod world have gotten used to and that they’d like to see continued on the iPhone.

4) iPhone “attract” mode
There’s currently a procedure you can go through to set up a video on the iPod such that when it’s been idle and it’s plugged into AC power, it will automatically begin to display video. I would think this could have been brought over, but maybe it didn’t make it into this first iteration.

5) Enhanced museum mode
The iPod Notes feature has been used by many as a way to set up a “Museum Mode”… a way to create custom or restricted interfaces for special purposes. (You can see how museums are using iPod by visiting the “Guided by iPod” web page) It will be interesting to see if this mode is supported on the iPhone or even if it has been enhanced to take advantage of the iPhone’s special features.

6) What kind of reading interface will it have?
As an extension of the above, the iPod notes currently have a 4k limitation. No one note can be larger than 4k, so any texts longer than that have to be cut up into 4k chunks and hyperlinks placed between them. There are programs that will handle this cut up and hyperlink job for you, but how will these notes be displayed? Will you get a page view with a “page turning” gesture?

7) Audio circuitry
Until the release of the first iPod games, there was really no way to tell that the iPod actually had quite a sophisticated bit of audio generation hardware. I’m wondering if this is the same or if it will be used in any new ways.

For the Keynoter in all of us
Finally, some musings on what we’d LIKE to see but are probably not LIKELY to see. We’ll know in a few days!

What can the iPhone do with .key files?
There has been NO indication that the iPhone will be able to translate and display the content of a Keynote file, but we’re going to try just to see.

9) What can the iPhone do with QuickTime files?
For many people, QuickTime is all about audio and video and that’s it. We, on the other hand, know about Chapters, Sprites, Quartz Compositions and all the other extra media that QuickTime handles well on the Mac. Have any of these made the leap to the iPhone?

10) Slideshow transitions
The iPod currently has transitions that, surprisingly enough, look quite good when displayed on a television. The Page and Cube transitions are especially nice given what we usually see in the iPod interface. With the Core Animation on the iPhone, more is available, will we see it? Better yet, will we be able to combine it with some of the above to create presentations for the iPhone that output to a video monitor?

As you see, this is a fairly esoteric list and that’s the main reason why you probably haven’t read much discussion on these topics. As the time ticks down to 6pm Eastern on Friday night, if you happen to get any answers before we do, come on back and post them for everyone. I’m sure SOME of the answers are bound to raise questions of their own!

In other news well…there’s be NO news on the Keynote front short of a few theme and extra announcements over the last few months. I have finally ordered a 17″ MacBook Pro so I can finally test out Keynote on a decent piece of hardware (and possibly take a look at Office 2007 to see what we’re in for when the Mac version ships later this year). I ended up getting the refurb of the current model, so no pretty box for me. Still, I saved a bundle and it’ll be a nice replacement for my 15″ 1.25 ghz PowerBook G4.

Anyway, look for more blog postings soon. I’m toying with some new story ideas and will likely hash them out in the coming weeks.

Anyway, on to more interesting things.

It looks like I’ll possibly be attending NAB this year (first time ever). I’m not only a fan of Keynote, I’m a fan of Final Cut Pro (I just got certified for FCP Level 1 a few days ago). I’m really hoping (along with most Mac fans) that Apple announces something BIG at the show. My guess (only a guess) is they’ll announce the release date of new 8 core towers, Leopard, and Final Cut Pro 6 (plus updates of all the included apps). I say announce because it would make sense to show them off at NAB, but wait until Leopard is done to ship them. Same with FCP. My guess is version 6 will require the goodies in 10.5.

So what the heck does this have to do with Keynote!? Nothing, though I suspect we’ll see iWork 07 and iLife 07 come out at the same time. And I suspect Keynote will also require the goodies in 10.5. I’m really hoping too that Apple sees fit to add an Export to iPod/iTunes function in Keynote so we don’t have to do a double export (once to a movie file, then through QT Pro into the iPod format) in order to make iPod movies.

Anyway, just my thoughts for the day.

I also installed a Digg plug-in, but for the moment, it only supports manually adding it to a story, so if we write a story that we think has a chance on Digg, we’ll add the button…if YOU feel like a story should be dugg, post the Digg story url in the comments and we’ll add the button right away.

Other than that, look for the official product launch of PowerBlue tomorrow morning (and pray the new plug-ins don’t break anything!).

I posted one little geeky story on Steve’s use of what was most likely a new version of Keynote and it spread all over the internet. You can find the story on the news page (I’m too lazy tonight to link it here). First macRumors posted it, then Tuaw.com, then DaringFireball gave us a tiny mention (which totally shocked me) and there have been sightings in languages I can’t read all over the web. We got Dugg, but not enough to end up anywhere you could find us without searching hard (though I did add a Digg This plugin to our news system).

All this BEFORE I released the new PowerBlue theme. Too bad I wasn’t a little more prepared or I might have been able to ride the traffic wave. I’m hoping it continues a bit more now that the theme is actually up on the site for sale.

By the way, this is the first theme release in nearly two years for us. Now that I’m back in the swing of theme making, I hope to release a few more this year (or at least get all the old Keynote Gallery themes up for sale again). Also on the list of things to do is upgrade the news system to WordPress 2 (2.1 is already out). That should make things a bit nicer, at least for the comments (no more moderating the comments!).

Anyway, I had my brush with Mac fame, and managed to finally get a new Theme out for sale…overall it was a good week

UPDATE: We’re going to have a big sale coming Monday, but I noticed a few of you bought the theme already at the full price. I sent the coupon code to my Yahoo list, but forgot to post it here. Sorry about that! If you want a nice discount on anything and everything in the store, put in the code FIRESALE and you’ll save 25% off anything you buy. Also, look for the “Theme Collection” to be updated with the new theme (with a new price of $99.95). The press releases will go out Monday, but I’ll be updating things on the site over the weekend.

PowerBlue

The tabs at the bottom of the page aren’t quite done, and of course there’s no price or link to the store as I haven’t even built the installers yet, let alone uploaded them. I’m in the midst of creating some demo slides for a sample QT movie, and then I have to finish making a tutorial that will come with the theme. As I’m already getting questions about the theme, you’ll see the last tab is for an FAQ. Some of the questions are things like, “Can I change the color of this theme?” or “what about circular cutouts?” Since those two are easy, I’ll answer them right here…YES, you can change the colors on this theme. All the photo cutouts are Keynote shapes with holes in them, so you can easily change out the background file in your .key package and the entire theme will change. As for the circular cutouts, with Keynote 3′s new Mask with Shape tool, you can easily mask your photos with a circle shape and add a shadow. It’ll look just like the photo cutouts that come with the theme. This works because the shadows of the cutouts are cast OUT away from the cutout and not inside it.

Anyway, look for a release in a few days (maybe even tomorrow if I can get the samples done). As always, expect a fair price for a whole lot of functionality and extras.

EDIT: We’ve posted the demo movie on that page now, so you can get an idea of what the theme looks like in action.
EDIT 2: Looks like we’re shaping up for a Monday release…we’ve got a few other goodies lined up too, so it should be an interesting day.

Kinemac is here with a new version that has some great new features and I got a runthrough of the app that should allow me to post some tutorials on how to create Keynote happy QuickTime movies. plasq is also here and, as you’d expect from the creators of Comic Life, they’re a great bunch of folx that have just released version 1.3 and and they’re pre-beta’ing new app called “Skitch”. It feels like it’s that dash of bitmap type editing that was missing from Comic Life, but with vector goodness! Hard to explain, but there should be more info forthcoming on that one. I got to meet Dave over at EazyDraw, still the only app that exports shape information as editable Keynote objects, and I got to speak with the developer of Lineform. That’s an app that I’ll be trying out for you. We also took a look at some of the new products from Digital Juice that, as always, look fantastic!

For presentation travelers, I found interesting bags from both RhinoSkin and Boom Bags. As a fan of minimalist good looking protection for my laptop, I like RhinoSkin’s approach to cases, especially the accessory pack that slides onto the case and the option to carry it on your back with backpack straps. Boom Bags are probably some of the sturdiest bags I’ve seen and if it was just that, they’d be fantastic. However, they also add an amplifier/speaker combo to each bag so that you NEVER have to fall back on shouting because the audio system in the room you’re using isn’t working.

I’ll be updating this post through the day, but I doubt it will be from a more comfortable seat! I’m going to check out a preview of Office 2008 to see how things are going over there.

Unfortunately, the preview of Office 2008 was only Word 2008 since, as the presenter commented, “Word is used more than any other app”. He spoke about some new features, but it really wasn’t much for someone looking to see how PowerPoint compared to Keynote.

Another thing I enjoyed seeing at this show was the great number of companies using Keynote in their displays. Some were more successful than others, but it was great seeing the wide usage at Macworld.

1) Bulleted LISTS!! – well, there were improvements to how bulleted lists are handled, so let’s call this one dead on!

2) New export option! – What do you know? Two for two! Well, I was wrong about playing cards and luncheon meat..oh, and glass, BUT there WERE new export options! We’ll call this one a tie.

3) Keynote Player for Windows! – Isn’t that what Boot Camp does? I’m gonna say this one is too close to call.

4) Special PowerPoint export! – I don’t think anyone will disagree that the PowerPoint export is indeed “special”. I’m giving this one two thumbs up!

5) MPEG display fixer-upper! – Sure, I got the color wrong, but it did get fixed! This one gets filed under yassir youbetcha!

And the extra special beta tester news? That was right on the money so I’ll call that one cash on da barrel-head!

And now, for what you’ve all been waiting for, this year’s list of “New Keynote Features”

1) Synched presentations!
Many have battled with this particular issue for some time, and Apple has come through with a solution! Using the iSight camera and the built in bluetooth, Keynote scans to determine how important a certain presentation is (judging by the number of people attending and how many bluetooth devices they have) and will, at some random point, crash wildly and ceremoniously, sure to “sink” any presentation! Not a feature that I’d want, but I’ll just say next time, make sure your spelling is correct in your feedback to Apple.

2) Special “Al Gore” mode
You didn’t think that Steve is the only guy that had access to new versions of Keynote, did you? Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t JUST the presentation parts of his documentary that used Keynote. The entire film was set up as a Keynote presentation and simply exported to QuickTime!! The only downside is that when using this mode, your presentation can only be about Global Warming

3) Price Break!
This is EXCELLENT news. The new version of iWork with all it’s spiffy new features will probably retail for $199.99. Not to fear, though, as users will be able to upgrade their old version of iWork at a reduced price! (Proof of purchase will be whether or not you’ve got the money to buy it.)

4) New LINK options
Keynote currently offers ways to link to other slides and even other presentations. This feature will be greatly expanded in Keynote 4 to include links to fingerprints found on various objects, links to foreign assets, links to nefarious plots and scams, links to government conspiracies and at least one Link to the Past (in coordination with Nintendo).

5) One more thing…
To add a hint of surprise and a bit of splash to ANY Keynote presentation, the newest version will now add a “One more thing” slide to the end of every presentation. The thing is, no one, not even YOU will know if it’s going to pull up an image from iPhoto of your last root canal, a video from iMovie of that fall you took on the first icy day, or that guilty little tune that you claim not to like but has the highest rating AND play count of any song you own. This is guaranteed to make the night before any presentation as anxious as the one that happens in January!

So there you have it, another senseless complete waste of time from the fun-loving folks at KeynoteUser. Here’s hoping that these predictions are as accurate as the ones from last year and that, if nothing else, you at least got a little chuckle from our antics. We’ll be watching the Keynote carefully today and will report back any REAL info we find.

Happy Macworld Day!