| Monday, February 17, 2003 |
01:12 - Pretty Keyn
http://www.apple.com/keynote/
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I had a gift certificate for $100 at Fry's; while showing off the Mesoamerican Temple this weekend, I decided to pick up a copy of Keynote, which the tuned-in will remember is Apple's new presentation software (intended as a "PowerPoint killer"). I figured that at a Benjamin, it made a pretty strong case for itself as a piece of business software-- if I ended up using it a lot, awesome; if not, at least it makes for a pretty box on the shelf.
First impressions are quite positive-- at least, after taking the time to look at the included quick-reference card which explained all the available palettes. (Without that reference, the interface is pretty opaque; but after all, this is a full-featured program, not an iApp.) Operation is very smooth and polished; I haven't run across any bugs yet that I can see.
To get a good impression of how it will benefit me in a business environment, though, I had to see how well the PowerPoint import/export function (its true killer feature, reality dictates) stood up. The way to do this is to "Open Samples..." and load up the demo presentation that Keynote comes with, and then export it to PowerPoint format. Then I shared it over to my Windows box and opened it up in PowerPoint, and then clicked through the respective versions on the two machines in parallel.
The distillation worked very well, at least in this case. There were some layout problems-- misaligned text here and there, and some graphics were anamorphically scaled incorrectly. But the part of the exporter that really shone was its ability to downgrade various neato-spiffy effects to fit into the PowerPoint feature set; if it was demonstrating some feature of Keynote's layout capabilities that PowerPoint didn't have, the exported version would display the best approximation of it that PowerPoint could manage.
For example, Keynote has a whole slew of fancy-dancey wipes and fades and object compositing effects. You can transition from one screen to another by rotating them as though two faces of a cube, or by flipping the whole thing horizontally or vertically, the 3D effect rendered in real-time by Quartz. But PowerPoint doesn't do that; so instead, the Keynote exporter picks the closest possible match from among the wipes that PowerPoint does support, preserving as much as possible of the effects that were applied in Keynote. For another example, Keynote lets you slide-in individual rows into a table, one by one; PowerPoint apparently doesn't. So during the export, Keynote consolidates all the slide-in frames that make up the whole table into a single slide-in table.
Some effects fail badly, though, in the exported format. Overlapping transparent/translucent shapes and drop shadows look like butt in PowerPoint, and the text rendering (naturally) is jaggy. Oddly, too, the wipe effects and general motion of the presentation on the Windows machine-- where, of course, everything is faster-- were choppy and jagged and rough. Whereas slides on the iMac running Keynote would slide in and out with velvet smoothness, slowing-in and -out in a way that makes the whole thing flow like a pre-rendered move, PowerPoint stutters and staggers through the same sequence of images, even simplified to a version that's opaque and unambitious. I'm greatly encouraged by Keynote's performance during playback; hooking up a Mac to the overhead projector at a meeting is now likely to involve a positive impression for the audience rather than a snicker of derision.
Keynote is slim on clip-art; there are a few palettes of symbols, and some general photo art, but none of the imagery present in PowerPoint (much of which has become iconic in its own right-- the businessman guy with his hat flying off, the stick-figure people with the round heads and hands, etc) is in evidence. True, you can drag in any image you want, but it would have been nice if they'd provided some more such goodies for handy access.
But then again, there's one age-old trap to avoid: macdinking, a phenomenon that has just been given a new opportunity to rear its ugly head.
The "mac" part of macdink comes from the Apple Macintosh which, thanks to its graphical interface and ease-of-use, encourages people to nudge their work for hours on end.
In other words, back in the dim times of word-processing, you could always tell when a piece had been done on a Mac, because it was full of overly-clever fonts and styles and things the writer employed just "because he could". I wasn't doing computer stuff for money at the time, so I can't claim to have first-hand knowledge of this; but I can certainly imagine the resentment that this practice would have fostered among the non-Mac-users in a given class or office.
Macdinking flirted with a comeback with the iApps; some people have expressed dismay at Apple's providing such tools as iMovie and iDVD to "average people", fearing a flood of boring-ass home videos of birthday parties and camping trips, composited by dads who think they're all the next Coppola because they have a camcorder and an iMac, so the saying goes. I'm reminded of Tom Lehrer's take on folk songs:
The reason most folks songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people... if professional songwriters had written them instead, things would have turned out considerably differently.
Just so, several commentators seemingly would have preferred that everyday Joes go without the ability to quickly and effortlessly turn raw footage into infinitely broadcastable video, if it meant they could ensure that all the videos anybody found online were of professional quality. (Shyeah.) The same argument went for HTML editors; we all feared (and perhaps rightly) a barrage of godawful gaudy web pages all designed from some prepackaged "theme" in FrontPage or whatever online service provided people with effortless page-writing tools.
But just as macdinking has undoubtedly caused this effect to a degree in websites and home movies and digital photography and the like, it can't be denied that it's enabled many people (who are talented) to create things they would never have otherwise. And just because Keynote has a whole portfolio of lavish themes full of eye candy doesn't mean it's automatically incapable of producing anything of substance. The same was true of PowerPoint; people will be able to tweak the hell out of a brainless presentation no matter what its feature set is. But Keynote offers enough extra stuff over what PowerPoint does that it actively encourages people (or me, at least) to get down and dirty with it. It's a fun program to work with, and for business productivity software that's a rare achievement.
I'm going to look forward to reading others' distributed PowerPoint files in Keynote; after all, when it imports them, it makes the text and graphics actually look better than they'd be in PowerPoint.
And with that, Apple takes one more significant-- if possibly a bit symbolic-- step toward autonomy from Microsoft. Let's hope they haven't bitten off more than they can chew.
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