By Paul Didzerekis, Mid-Columbia Macintosh User Group member
from The Finder, newsletter of the Mid-Columbia Macintosh Users Group.

Keynote is a presentation program that can be used to display information in an organized and consistent manner much like a slide projector. If you are familiar with Microsoft PowerPoint you know basics.

Wow, what a program. I mean that in a lot of ways some good and some not so good. Keynote is so much more glitzy, easier, and more fun to use than it's Microsoft counterpart, PowerPoint. But on the other hand it is rather large in size, took a long time to install on my iBook 600, it has pretty steep system requirements and it is lacking in at least one feature that I use a lot in PowerPoint.

Keynote is another homerun for Apple in that it packs a lot of features for the price point. Because Apple wrote (and know it inside out) the operating system that Keynote is running on they were able to custom program it to take full advantage of a that foundation. Microsoft could do they same thing since Apple makes all the information available to developers that would be required to utilize things like Quartz rendering and Open GL. You can get Keynote, US $99, for less than half of what PowerPoint currently costs, US $229. The transitions that you can do to, well I hate to be redundant but, transition from one slide to the next are amazing in their smoothness, but Apple needs to add more of them or make it possible for people to create their own within Keynote.

The themes that come with and are available from third parties and just fabulously beautiful and some are even breath-taking. You can utilize the themes to quickly apply a series of colours, fonts, etc to a single slide or an entire presentation.

You can open PowerPoint presentation, in my experience, flawlessly and their appear to be no conversion problems. You can import a variety of graphics formats like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, GIF, JPG, TIFF, PNG, PDF, Flash and including anything that QuickTime can translate. It even preserves Photoshop Alpha channels and transparencies You can even export to PowerPoint format and also as Quicktime (also available in PowerPoint) and as PDF (also available in PowerPoint using the print to PDF trick). But one big disappointment for me is that you can't export your presentations as a website like you can with PowerPoint. I see this as Apple trying to force people to utilize QuickTime movie format for use when converting presentations for display on a website. This is a move in the wrong direction for Apple. They should embrace all options and make them available to their users not take a lesson from the evil empire in Redmond in forcing their standards on us.

Speaking of graphics, the graphics manipulation capabilities within Keynote are a great timesaver that you really have to see to appreciate. You don't have to re-edit your imported graphics in Photoshop and then reimport them. And the compositing of text and graphics that previously had to be done in Photoshop are also a bonus.

There is already a big loyal following for Keynote with fan sites providing repositories of themes, tips, troubleshooting, etc. You can find links to the main ones in the Resources section of the Keynote website at http://www.apple.com/keynote/

All in all I do like Keynote and I think it is worth the price but Apple needs to decrease the requirements for this gem or we will all need to by new, faster, bigger computers to use it. Oh wait, that is the primary thing Apple sells, isn't it, computers.

System Requirements
Power Mac G3 or G4, PowerBook G4, eMac, 500MHz or faster iMac or iBook, Mac OS X v10.2 or later
128MB of RAM (512MB recommended)
8MB of video memory (32MB recommended)
1GB of available disk space

These are rather ridiculous especially when compared to what everyone considers the premier graphics editing program, Photoshop. Here are its requirements:
PowerPC processor (G3, G4, or G4 dual)
Mac OS software version 9.1, 9.2, or Mac OS X version 10.1.3 128 MB of RAM
(192 MB recommended)
320 MB of available hard-disk space
800x600 colour monitor with 16-bit colour or greater video card
Or when compared to the System requirement for Microsoft Office which PowerPoint is part of:
Processor: G3, Mac OS X-compatible processor or higher Operating System: Mac OS X version 10.1 or later Memory: 128 MB of RAM
Hard Disk: 196 MB of available hard disk space for a default installation of Office Drives: CD-ROM drive (or connection to a local area network if installing over a network) Display: Monitor that can display 256 colors and a resolution of 800 x 600 or higher

(c) 2003 Mid-Columbia Macintosh Users Group