Over the past few weeks I’ve gotten several inquiries into why we haven’t put the Keynote Gallery themes we purchased a few months ago back up for sale on Keynoteuser.com. The truth is, I’m a perfectionist. When I started digging into the actual theme files, I noticed little things that personally, I’d never let go in one of my theme releases. The average user might never notice them, but I sure did. The biggie was that many of the photo cutouts from slide to slide didn’t match up. When you’d jump from one slide to another slide you could actually see the cutout edges move. Smaller annoyances were that anything that wasn’t turned on by default on a slide wasn’t formatted. That means if you grabbed the “Blank” master and then decided to turn on the title, it didn’t match the theme (usually it was gill sans colored black). This goes for titles, body boxes, page numbers, etc. I just didn’t want to release what I consider unfinished themes (not bad in most cases, just unfinished) with my name on them, so I haven’t.

So what’s to become of these themes? Well, if you were a fan of Keynote Gallery’s work, don’t worry, I haven’t tossed them in the trash. I’m slowly working through each of them, cleaning up the cutouts, checking all the text formatting and even adjusting the graphics as I see necessary. I can’t say for sure just WHEN they’ll go back on sale, but I can say that they WILL go back on sale at some point this year.

My dream presentation app
This post is one I’ve had saved in our news system for months but never finished. I decided with the likely release of a new version of Keynote on the horizon, I’d go ahead and post my idea for my dream presentation app. We’ll call it Presentation Studio Pro. It would be to Keynote what Final Cut Pro is to iMovie and DVD Studio Pro is to iDVD.

Read the rest of this entry »

This years Macworld is shaping up to be a pretty nice show, especially now that Apple is pushing the hype on their front page. The bad news? I won’t make it to Macworld, which means I won’t be doing a live blog this year. I’ll be stuck at my local Apple store reading the other live blogs, all the while hoping iWork ’07 gets released and that they have it in stock at the store the day of the Keynote. Meanwhile, Ken will be at the show, though he won’t make it into the Keynote. You’ll probably be able to find him wandering the Apple booth playing with iWork (if it indeed gets released as we hope). Between the two of us, we sould be able to answer any and all questions about Keynote 4. As always, you should know we have NO inside information on Keynote 4/iWork 7. All we know is Steve has used some new effects in his recent presentations, and iWork has been released along side iLife for the last 2 years.

In other news…our New Years resloution this year is to try our best to get news out in a more timely manner (please, no comments on how old the KeynotePro story is that went up today), and to try our best to get more reviews and tutorials up on the site. I’m planning on releasing a new theme VERY soon (it’s done, but I want to get Keynote 4 before I release it since we’re only days away) and that should bring more traffic to the site…and if the newcomers don’t find anything new, well, that would be bad

I haven’t made a blog entry in a long while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy! I’ve got several new themes in the works (including Frames 2!) and today I added several new video countdowns to the store. I haven’t created a preview page yet, but for those of you looking for a quick break timer you can stick on a slide (or bring into Final Cut Pro and dress up) these should work nicely. I plan to create a whole set of these in different fonts, and even create a few that have ending text such as “Please return to your seats” or “Break time is now over.” The best part? The raaw timers are priced at $5.99, which for a raw QT timer is pretty darn cheap.

You can find the timers here:
QuickTime Countdown Timers

My newest theme, “PowerBlue” is nearly complete, and I hope to have it up for sale within a week, but I’ve never been good at hitting release dates, so don’t hold me to that!

When Apple added DVD export to Keynote 3, I was happy to see the new feature. In the past, when I’d ask the Apple people at Macworld why Keynote didn’t have this, they mentioned that the quality would be so bad (going from computer screen to tv screen) that people would complain. I thought that was a lame excuse, but judging by my tests today, they might have been right.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ll have to bare with me on this post. It isn’t about Keynote, it’s about all of Apple’s software, and it’s pretty long. See, I had this amazing thought the other about where Apple could be headed with all the technology they have now. I also might gripe about about where some of their apps are now, just to balance everything out

Groundwork for a new core functionality?
Let’s start with iWork and iWeb. Notice anything similar? Yep, all three apps are based on the same object/xml engine. I can almost guarantee that we’ll see more apps based on this engine in the future as it’s just makes sense. But take a moment and think about where this could go. Any Apple app that needs layout tools could use this engine, and to take that further, Apple could include something like Core Layout or Core Objects in the OS, giving ANYONE the ability to add this stuff into their own apps, complete with copy and paste abilities. Heck, they could even include some sort of import/export functionality, making their own open document format. Got a layout in one app and want it in another, just copy and paste the items from one to the other, or save and import.

Now, this would probably require Apple to beef up the engine a bit more. You still can’t make objects with holes in them with the tools in the current apps, though the xml schema can support them (check out the svg2key command line tool that can make Keynote objects with holes in them). The scheme even includes support for multi-color gradients (as in, more than 2), which you also can’t create in any of the current apps. Apple actually built in quite a bit of support for things they haven’t turned on yet.

Apple, are you paying attention?,
Okay, so why haven’t we seen this show up in more Apple apps? I have no idea, but it makes me wonder if some of the departments never take a peek over into other departments. I mean, if you were working on a new Apple app, and you knew you needed a layout engine, wouldn’t you call the iWork guys and see if you could “borrow” theirs? While it is good to see that new apps are starting to be built on this engine (first pages, then iWeb), it’s the current apps that really need an overhaul.

Take a look at an app like DVD Studio Pro and you can see it really needs something like this. Anyone who’s ever used even the newest version knows the actual layout tools are total crap. You can’t create any actual objects in the app itself except text. Other objects or shapes, buttons, etc must be imported or added to your objects library. On top of that, actually laying things out is a lesson in frustration. In most apps, when you want to select several things, you can simply draw a shape around them with your cursor and they will all be selected. In DVD Studio Pro, as soon as you click and drag on your menu background, the cursor creates a new button (and don’t get me started on the terrible performance the app has in layout mode). This app just screams out for the unified layout engine that Apple seems to be building. The ability to make shapes, mask images with shapes, etc, would be a whole new world for menu building. On top of that, you could likely take a Keynote slide and just copy/paste it onto a menu in DVD Studio Pro.

In fact, all of the Pro apps could benefit from a unified layout engine. Motion sort of has its own tools, LiveType is a mess really, when it comes to shapes (more like DVD Studio Pro). I can’t see Final Cut Pro getting this treatment, though it might be nice to have something other than a rectangular slug to make shapes with. They could add this to Aperture and give you better book layout tools right in the app, and I suppose if you do that, you wouldn’t want to leave out iPhoto (though then you open up the ability to really mess up a book, which is bad for a consumer app).

Amazing Cross-app Integration
Going even further down this road, you can see an amazing future ahead. If Apple made this engine AND the effects engine in Keynote system wide, you could feasibly open and play Keynote files in the QT player the way you can with LiveType and Motion documents now. This could lead to more advanced things, like the ability to open a Keynote project directly in DVD Studio Pro. Think of it, you want a full working, interactive presentation DVD, and all you have to do is open your Keynote file in DVD Studio Pro and tell it what you want to do with it. DVD Studio Pro then makes a track from it, complete with nav buttons (which can be currently be created in DVDSP with a little trick using the subtitle track). No export to Quicktime needed, no special chapter stops and subtitle buttons to create, it’s all done for you. You might even be able to drop a Keynote file onto the timeline in Final Cut Pro, again, the way you can with Motion and LiveType projects.

Apple could even create more new apps, such as flow charting and outline apps (and of course they’d get charged with ripping off the Omni guys in the process, but that hasn’t bothered them in the past). Having the same engine as Keynote would mean easy movement between apps. The outliner app could simply read the xml from the Keynote file and ignore the layout styles, just letting you edit the outline that the slides are based on. They could also build my dream presentation app, which I’ll describe in my next blog entry.

Attracting Developers
So what are the other benefits from a system like this besides amazing apps and powerful integration? How about attracting Developers? If you’re a programmer and you know that OS X allows you to create an app with audio, video, photo editing AND layout and design tools, plus possibly a document scheme, wouldn’t you be a bit more inclinded to at least give it a good look before going to Windows? And when you give a developer access to the same stuff that Apple has access to, you sometimes get similar applications, but with different interface twists. This means, that while Apple might “steal” ideas from some developers, there’s potential for a lot of new developers to “steal” some ideas back and make their own take on basic apps. There are already apps out there that give you a different front end on Address Book, all the while tying into mail and ical (CRM4Mac is one I can think of), so we know there’s room for variety in the Mac world, giving programmers better tools means they’re more likely to attempt adding to that variety.

In Conclusion
Okay, is your brain hurting? Mine is. But the possibility of all this gets me excited. I just hope Apple sees it. I hope this is all part of Steve’s big plan to dominate in the coming years. Even though Apple is a hardware company, the best way to attract people to your hardware is to attract them to your software. They already know this…but if they continue to keep this in mind, I can’t imagine them not at least looking at the path I’ve outlined here at some point in their planning. It just makes sense to me. I hope it makes sense to Apple.

I was reading the list of presentations at WWDC today (you can find them here) and noticed some interesting things.

The first presentation on the list is “Adding Applescript Scriptability to your Application.” Right. It took until Keynote 3 to get decent Applescript in there, and Pages 2 only just added it. Even then it’s not as robust as say, what you can do with Quark (sure Quark is way more expensive, but wouldn’t it be a cool demo for apple to show off auto filling a catalog in Pages with images from a folder?).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m finally blogging again. I had to. I had to share my frustration with SOMEONE. See, I’m working on a new theme (finally!) and I Ken suggested I make sure it exports to PPT correctly. So I tried…and it was a mess. Let me explain how the theme is constructed first, then explain how PowerPoint totally screws it up.

The photo cutouts in this theme are actually Keynote shapes with holes in them. There are other themes out there doing this, and I’m finally getting on board with one too. The benefit is that the background on every slide, including photo cutouts, can be changed easily without leaving Keynote. But what about shadows? I wanted a fake cast shadow, so that when you put your image behind the cutout, it appears that there’s a shadow coming out from under it. Okay, so I got the great idea of duplicating the cutout shape and sticking a png file that looks like a cast shadow inside that. It sits on top of the actual photo cutout shape. This gave me super clean lines along the cutout edge that perfectly matched the cutout below. And then my world fell apart.

You see, when you export a Keynote file to PPT the Keynote shapes actually come over intact. It’s pretty slick. The problem is, PowerPoint shapes do NOT support transparent images as their fill. The background was fine since it is actually a solid png, but the shadows come over completely filled with white as the background of the shape, with the shadow visible on top of that. Basically, that trick is completely useless when going to PPT.

So I had to create an elaborate work around to get the thing to work (which I won’t share as it’s still being worked on).

I tell you this for two reasons:

1. To tell you how much of a piece of junk I think PowerPoint is
2. To tell you how much work and planning goes into one of my themes.

There, I feel better already.

Someone asked me today if we were going to post any more installments to our Keynote by the numbers series. The anwswer is YES, but I’ve been pretty busy lately catching up from my week at Macworld. Don’t worry, there’s more to come, including reviews of the DVD export, 3d charts, reflections, etc.

As you can see, I didn’t even manage to post very many blogs once the expo started. It was all Ken and I could do to get the details on Keynote 3 and make some of the appointments I had scheduled (such as the interview with Chuck Joiner that’s posted on our front page). Overall it was a great expo, and Keynote 3 really does look like a great product. I keep thinking each time we see a new version that we’ll finally completely surpass PPT, but I keep forgetting that PPT has been around a LONG time. One the one hand it’s a bummer to see a few key features still not there in Keynote, but I have to remember that for a v3 product, this thing really has a LOT to offer.

Other items of importance are some issues with our themes in K3. While most things work, there are some bullet issues that have come up and color issues with the 3d charts (though the color issues are certainly not show stoppers). I’ll be working hard this week to redo most of the themes to be Keynote 2 or higher compatible, so the bullet issues will go away. Frames is due for a complete overhaul, though I may still at least fix the bullet issues and get a quick update out the door.

Now that Keynote 3 is out, I’ll be going through the site completely and FINALLY updating all the old info that I somehow never got to after Keynote 2. There’s a LOT of old information on the site that is now completely outdated (I had to take the entire FAQ down actually). So, look for more in-depth stuff on Keynote 3, and more updated info on the rest of the site in the coming days. Once that’s done, I hope to also retool all the themes and make K2 and 3 installers, and also (FINALLY) get back to making a completely new version of Frames that allows for changing the background color. I can’t give an ETA on that one, and even if I did, most of my long time readers know I never hit my deadlines.

I started the day at about 5:30, thinking I might have to stand in line long. Had I known there were only about 30 or 40 of us with red “Macworld Supporter” ribbons, and that we were stuck LAST in the order of everything, so when everyone else had a seat, we got the left overs in the overflow room…I’d have slept in till 8 or so and wandered down to get in line.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re like me, you’ve been watching all of the presentations Steve has done between last MacWorld and now NOT to see the introduction of some silly pod thing or some fast compy thing BUT to see if you can discern what the next version of Keynote is going to look like. Come on, you KNOW you noticed some transitions that aren’t in the version that you have. A Barn Door? Venetian Blinds, oh yeah! Knowing that the first version was tested by Mr. Jobs at actual shows before it was released, it takes only a leap of illogic and bit of wishful thinking to believe that what I see him do on stage, I’ll be able to do in a few short months.

For those that JUST CAN’T wait, here’s a rundown of what I think is rapidly approaching like a runaway presentation train.

1) Bulleted LISTS!!
I know a lot of you have been upset about Keynote allowing only one bulleted list per slide. Well, in the NEW version, there will be three! No, not one, not two, three! And it won’t be an option either, EVERY slide will have three bulleted lists! Who needs picture cutouts, graphic flourishes and alla that hooh-hah when you can stun them into submission with three bulleted lists on every ding-dang slide! As a side feature, the “print” command will be replaced with “handout”.

2) New export option!
In addition to an export to playing cards and luncheon meat, Keynote’s new export powers will also include a format that’s just perfect for use by glass cutting/etching machines! Because we know REAL presenters use glass! Just like Steve used to use back at NeXT (well, before Concurrence, but I can’t say much about that…hush hush)

3) Keynote Player for Windows!
You’ve asked for it and, with the new version you GET it! The wizards at Apple have worked their magic and produced an installer that solves the problem of Windows’ lack of graphic prowess. When you install it, it first removes any and all traces of Windows from the drive (using a feature they like to call “formatting”). Then it installs just enough of OSX on x86 to allow presentations to play in all their glory. Sure, that computer won’t be able to run Windows anymore, but come ON. Who really CHOOSES to run Windows??

4) Special PowerPoint export!
Sometimes it works so so, sometimes it doesn’t and it’s maddening for those that would like to have a Keynote presentation in PowerPoint format. Well that little issue will be a thing of the past! Now, Keynote’s PPT export will consist of the same file exported for any presentation created! When this file is opened with PowerPoint, you will be greeted with a white slide that says “Your application is not worthy of this presentation. Please purchase Keynote or the Keynote Player for Windows.” Who’s gonna complain about colors being off or a font not looking right with THAT staring them in the face?

5) MPEG display fixer-upper!
People having problems with that green border around MPEG files won’t EVER have to see THAT again. Now it’s purple.

In a bit of bad news, one Keynote beta tester is going to be given the pink slip. Apparently, Apple’s found a replacement at another company that has all of the same strengths as their prior tester, freeing him up for more important projects. My prediction is that it’ll be a “high up” person at Pixar. More on this as it develops. (Which of course it won’t as this is a joke)

We hope you’ve enjoyed our addition to the prognostication that surrounds every MacWorld Keynote. We really have no idea what’s coming but we’ll be there to tell you all about the goodness to come!

Oh, and umm, something’s going to be done with Pages… probably.

I’ve just finished a day of training for a new version of an unnamed mac app that will probably be announced on Monday or Tuesday. Don’t get your hopes up, it’s NOT from Apple. As a mac consultant by day, I have to stay currrent on things, and this training was worth the money I spent on it (and we’ve only done day 1 of 2). It really has nothing to do with Keynote stuff, but it’s an amazing app regardless (they did use Keynote for all their presentations though!). I’ll likely gush a bit more once they announce it. Anyway, the day was prety uneventful, so I won’t waste your time with more babbling

I arrived at the Oakland Airport at about 1 pm and hopped on the AirBart shuttle to the Bart station, and took the BART into the Powell St station on Market street. Not a bad trip for just over $5. I hooked up with a few fellow Mac consultants and we took the cable car to China town. Here it got interesting. One of the consultants is originally from Singapore, and another had heard of a great restaurant called the Golden Mountain. We made it there just before they closed at 3, and Tan (the one from Singapore) jumped right in and started ordering food for us. Heh…I have a feeling Doug (the other consultant) and I were the only white people in the place…and honestly, I’m not sure what was in some of the stuff we ate, but it was an experience. Tan tried to get us to try the Tripe…until we found out it was some kind of stomach lining from an animal…we passed. The crysthanthemum tea wasn’t bad, and I HATE tea. Yeah, you read that right. Made from flowers . We also had some kind of rice soup, which we added soy sauce to. Overall, it was worth the experience. I heartily recommend finding your way to China town for some REAL Chinese food if you ever get to San Francisco.

After lunch (felt like dinner since it was 6:00pm my body time) we walked down to the Fisherman’s Wharf and ended up taking a $10 boat tour around the bay, including a trip under the Golden Gate and around the back side of Alcatraz. It was well worth the $10. You should have seen us though…3 grown men wrapped in blankets on the front of a small fishing boat looking at the sites. The blankets were provided and the tour guide was entertaining.

After that we walked over to Ghirardeli square and had milk shakes at Laurie’s diner. Laurie’s diner is a local chain that is my favorite stop in San Fran. The Powell Street location looks down over the cable line and is just a nice spot to eat. We were at their Wharf location, which looks out over the bay, but at night you can’t see much.

We took the cable back up, made a quick stop at a nearby Walgreens and then headed back to the Monticello to catch up on e-mail and blog

EDIT: By the way, I TOTALLY got nailed by the Bushman of San Fran. There’s a guy who sits all day behind a small shrub and jumps out at people. I was walking backwards (big mistake) and my two pals SAW the guy as we approached. BAM-I yelled VERY loudly and then noticed the crowd laughing at me, including one guy with a video camera. Great, someday I’ll find my reaction posted on a web page for all to see.

I got my copy of Aperture a few days ago and have been messing with it, mostly to see what it can and can’t do. Of course, NOT being a pro photographer, my take is VERY skewed . From what I’ve seen so far, vrsion 1 is a pretty neat app. I’ve just begun messing with color adjustments, and the book layouts. Books in Aperture are very similar to Themes in how they’re implemented, with one BIG difference. As far as I can tell, the book templates only reside INSIDE the app, I don’t think there’s a Book Themes folder somewhere on the hard drive that one could install new themes into. That said, I made a duplicate copy of one of the book themes and changed the name inside a plist file. It shows up inside Aperture as a new book. The problem is, I still can’t find where the book SIZES are tagged. That means, you can create book themes that fit Apple’s 2 sizes, but nothing else. I suppose the benefit to this is you’ll only be able to create book themes that can be sent to Apple to be printed, which is a good thing.

Being a version 1 app, I did run into several missing features that I really wanted to see there. The biggest was not being able to fix a photo’s rotation in the book layout. In fact, I had to dig around until I found the straighten photo tool in order to do an arbitrary rotate…the regular rotate buttons only move in 45 degree increments. On top of that, I wanted to match two photos up in sort of a fake panorama. While I did finally get something that looked decent (considering how far off the photos were from each other) I really wanted to be able to use the Light table function to crop, rotate and generally mess with both photos side by side, which I found I could not do.

Anyway, if you’re reading this and wondering what kind of moron I am, remember 1. I’m no Pro Photographer and 2. I didn’t read the manual yet. As a member of Apple’s Consulting Network, we get discounted software or NFR’s (Not for resale) copies of many of Apple’s software titles. The draw back is that usually it’s JUST the discs, and the manuals are all PDF. Ah well, at least it didn’t cost me $499

UPDATE!: I found this post on the Apple forums:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=258741&tstart=0

which mentions this folder:
Library:Application Support:Aperture:Book Themes

So, even though I heard right from an Apple sales guy that you couldn’t create book themes for Aperture, here we find a folder that Aperture sees, JUST like Keynote. Good to know for those wanting to get into the Theme making business

I really love technology, especially when companies come out with something you makes you say “Why didn’t someone make this years ago?” The new DualHead2Go is one such product. It’s so powerfully simple that I’m amazed that it hasn’t already been done (maybe it has, but I haven’t ever seen one before). The potential for amazing wide format presentations is now affordable.

Other items of interest…I’m REALLY hoping for great things in January. I am out of the loop as far as new Apple products are concerned so I don’t know any more than any of you when it comes to new versions of Keynote. I’m sure hoping for Keynote 3 though. My short list of new feature requests would be:
1. Better audio control
2. Motion path animation
3. Animation and transition plug-in architecture so 3rd parties could expand Keynote
3. A new Theme selector window, the old one just can’t handle the amount of themes now
4. Better QT controls, including the ability to show the controller (or even use a 3rd party skinned controller!) and the ability to use the mouse on VR and Flash files
5. better presenter screen, like PPT 2004 or better. Currently the slide selector is annoying
6. resizable thumbnails in the slide navigator and (finally) a slide sorter mode
7. better Applescript support so Saling clicker can pull notes and slide thumbs for my Treo 650
8. DVD publishing, including the ability to include one self playing and one interactive (with stops) on the DVD, plus the option to include the actual .key file on the disc.
9. better flash support, including tapping into the flash video encoder if Flash 8 Pro is installed

As I said, this is my short list, there’s a lot more where that came from, but that’s enough for tonight.

Oh, one more thing, I’ve redone the Macworld blog in preperation of Macworld 06. You can find the blog here.

I’m slowly getting some things updated on the site. The end of the year is the only time I really have FREE time on my hands (finally!) so I’m working my way through the parts of the site that need some major work. This weekend I updated the front page with a bit more freshness. It’s still a work in progress I think, as the left side bar is starting to look old now. I also visited the tech support pages and review pages and added some links to stuff posted in the new news engine. Now when someone visits the bug list page they’ll find a link to the NEW bugs that are in the new system. I updated the links page with some new theme sites, and made a note that Gerry’s MyKeynoteThemes site is now gone (but he is working on Pagesuser.com).

On a side note, I thought that switching from GoLive (v6) to Dreamweaver (v8) would be a good thing. While it’s more stable than GL6, it’s got its own set of VERY annoying problems. I have a feeling that since CSS is so popular now, none of the tools have bothered fixing old table editing tools…and my site is mostly nested tables (I know, I know). It took me hours to get the front page changes working properly because DW8 just doesn’t care what size I want my table cells, it makes them whatever it wants, forcing me to go back into the html code and fix it. It has a bad habbit of adding a space character to empty table cells, and applying a CSS style to that text. Because you can’t see it, and you never see the height for that space character, it makes a problem…especially if that style is larger than the table cell can hold. You get a tall cell, that shows the correct height that you WANT, but never actually displays the way you want it. Deleting the style tag and the space character fixes it, but you have to do that all by hand. It’s very annoying!

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be able to get more changes and updates on the site this week. I really want to post a few reviews and more tutorials, I just never know when I’ll have time to get to them, and since I like to use lots of screen shots in my stuff, it takes a lot of time to prep.

I’m testing out using the main news engine to drive the blog page. I finally got the FRONT of the site to NOT show blog entries, but I plan to tweak it so they come up when you do a search. The only problem now is that I can’t make the search work on THIS page, but it DOES work from the News page. Basically, this is a special single page that only shows the Blog entries. As I learn how to tweak WordPress, it’ll get a bit more functionality.