You’ve probably been there. That business lunch you wolfed down is starting to settle. All you want to do is retire to your hotel room for a few “zzzz’s”, and here comes the computer slideshow presentation.

Just as your eyes begin to roll back into your head, you notice the gleaming Titanium laptop of the presenter. Then the show begins. You realize “Hey, there’s something different about this presentation. It’s looks great. It’s more like a movie than a slideshow. They must have spent a fortune. Maybe I better stay up for this one.” You’ve seeing Keynote at work.

Keynote, unveiled in January at MacWorld in San Francisco, is Apple’s new presentation application. It’s similar to Microsoft Office’s PowerPoint – you create and organize a slide show to present information, most often through the computer to a projector and onto a screen. Keynote and PowerPoint have some common ground – they both keep a list of slides on the left, on the right side the slide development area, and floating palettes to modify the elements. But the similarities stop there. Keynote, only available on Macs with OS 10.2 “Jaguar”, takes advantage of the operating system’s advanced Quartz and OpenGL (2D and 3D graphic rendering engines) to produce cinematic presentations that are, visually, light years ahead of Windows-based competitors.

Both Keynote and PowerPoint use themes – common background images and text fonts to give the presentation a consistent look and feel. However, where PowerPoint’s themes seem dated and cartoonish, Keynote’s themes are gorgeous. Text in all sizes is anti-aliased (smooth) and more legible, and shadows and other effects have a almost touchable 3D texture to them. Keynote comes with twelve attractive themes, and more themes are available from third-party sources online.

Clip Art in Keynote is real art. Photo quality. Fully scalable without quality loss. Alpha channels are supported, so there’s no white or black box around images. It has layering, rotation, transparency, shading, and opacity controls that rival Photoshop. In fact, you can import Photoshop and Illustrator files while preserving the layers, as well as Quicktime movies, PDF files, and Flash animations.

Once you place text or images on the slide, Keynote has alignment guides – thin yellow lines that appear when you have the selected image or text horizontally and vertically centered, then fade away when their job is done.

Making tables to hold data is also a breeze. Eye-catching column, bar, area, line and pie charts display your data.

Where Keynote really distances itself from PowerPoint is in the integration of OSX’s graphic capabilities when building transitions between slides. Dissolving from one slide to another is smooth and cinematic, unlike PowerPoint’s pixilated mess. Space here doesn’t permit describing each transition, but one that stands out is a 3D cube, with each side being a slide, that rotates from side to side and from top to bottom. Wipes, fades, pivots, pushes, reveals, twirls, mosaics - they’re all stunning.

Now, there are some PowerPoint features that aren’t implemented in Keynote – yet (remember, this is version 1.0). You can’t assign timing to each slide, or include background music, or import AppleWorks or Excel spreadsheets directly onto your slides. Moving from slide to slide, or moving elements on slides while presenting, requires direct control. However, a script was just introduced that enables your Sony Ericcson Bluetooth phone to act as a remote controller through your Bluetooth-enabled laptop. Pretty cool.

Apple’s stated goal for Keynote is to make your presentation look like a team of highly paid graphics professionals stayed up all night making it for you. They’ve achieved just that. Keynote sells for $99. Learn more about Keynote at: http://www.apple.com/keynote/.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski