Review: Keynote ‘09
- Article 67 of 89
- MacFormat, March 2009
It's the main reason for buying iWork, but has it been resting on its laurels?
When most people buy iWork, what they're really after is Keynote: anyone who's been on the receiving end of a PowerPoint presentation knows there has to be something that doesn't produce such ugly-looking slides by default. Keynote is that 'something', a presentation package good enough for Steve Jobs and which uses the Mac's graphics capabilities and Apple's design savvy to the full.
To a certain extent, Keynote '09 rests on the laurels of Keynote '08. It was already an excellent product and even the advent of PowerPoint 2008 wasn't enough to make Apple think it had serious competition and spur it on: while Keynote is the best part of iWork, PowerPoint is the weakest link in Office 2008.
The experienced Keynote user won't notice too many changes at first: everything's just a little bit glossier, just a little bit more up-to-date than in Keynote 4.0. Some of the modal-sheet dialogues, such as the Theme Chooser, have been replaced, some of the default icons in the toolbar changed. There are also two new menus: Play, for recording and playing slideshows; and Share, for working with iwork.com and exporting slideshows and sending them to other people by email in Keynote, PDF or PowerPoint format. And a couple of functions have disappeared: Web View and Flash Export.
The Theme Chooser at the beginning has been improved to allow you to resize the theme thumbnails to see the included fonts, colours and textures more clearly using a slider at the bottom of the chooser. One drawback of this is that at top size, third-party Keynote themes look blurry. You can also mouse over a theme to view the slide designs associated it, with different areas of each thumbnail revealing different slides.
In addition, there are eight new themes, all at the upper end of the quality spectrum, with "Venetian", "Kyoto" and "Editorial" looking particularly good. If you look very hard, you'll notice numerous little improvements as well, such as a couple of new chart types and object builds.
But most of the effort hasn't gone into giving Keynote a wealth of new bells and whistles. So if you're were expecting some kind of layout automation akin to PowerPoint's Smart Art so you don't have to individually hand craft each slide, think again.
Instead, most of the effort has gone into new kinds of animations. Magic Move is a transition that takes an object that's repeated over various slides and automatically changes its location, scale, opacity and/or rotation across consecutive slides.
New text transitions - Anagram, Shimmer, Sparkle and Swing - morph text from one slide to the next. There are also new object transitions - Object Push, Object Zoom, Perspective, Revolve - that animate objects off one slide while simultaneously animating objects onto the next slide with a choice of effects. A connector line object allows you to move objects around a slide and for its connections to other objects to remain intact. For those who like 3D charts, these now include cylinder shapes, bevelled-edge pie charts, new textures and four new 3D build effects. There's also an advanced gradient fill that can handle multiple colours and radial fills.
The last feature - if it can be called that since it doesn't come with iWork '09 but is a separate download from Apple's app store, albeit one costing only 59p - is the Keynote Remote application. Although not as good as Stage Hand (www.wooji-juice.com/products/stagehand/), this lets you view slides and presenter notes and control your presentation with your iPhone or iPod touch. Obviously the slides and presenter notes are a big step up from most slideshow remote controls, but if all you want to do is go back and forth between slides, there are plenty of options available already, not the least of which is the Apple Remote Control. It also relies on there being a WiFi network that both your iPod/iPhone and your Mac can join, which in most offices isn't the case, and you'll have to tell it whether you plan on using it in portrait or landscape mode.
While Keynote '09 isn't a totally must-have upgrade, there are enough improvements that just about any user will be tempted by it.