Keynote Slides

Oh well. I gave it the old college try, honest I did. I've been using Apple's Keynote for all my new presentations of Jay Zimmerman's No Fluff Just Stuff symposia. It's been an interesting exercise in both technology and psychology (I first starting talking about this in Keynote).

Today I started work on the last of them. And I sat and stared at the keyboard for a fair while before I started. I wanted to use Keynote. I really did. But in the end, I caved and went back to Powerpoint.

It wasn't a cut-and-dried decision. I still like Keynote. I love the way its slides look, and I think the alignment guides are a tremendous piece of interface technology. But the minor hassles just broke this camel's back. I needed to draw a fair number of diagrams for this one: nothing fancy, just labeled boxes, circles, and arrows. but with Keynote each of these is two separate elements. It's a minor thing, but a hassle, particularly when you have to keep grouping and ungrouping them to make them animate properly. Then there was the export issues: Jay wants 2-up PDFs or Powerpoints. Even if I could work out how to do two-up PDF exports, Keynote seems to generate massive PDFs (unless I disable background images).

None of it is major, but it all gets in the way. And I just needed to get the job done. However, when 1.1 rolls along (or if Apple have a beta available somewhere) I'll be trying it: I really want Keynote to succeed.