posted by acaben
on Friday January 10, @12:15AM
from the xml-is-good-for-you dept.
jonknee writes "I'm a lucky guy, I have a copy of Keynote. While poking around, I found the XML file that actually controls the whole aspect of the presentation. Being a good geek, I wrote about it and posted some code along with a blank presentation for others to prod into. Enjoy!"
I hope and wish that these will become part of the standard Cocoa toolbar so I can use them in any number of other apps from TextEdit to Create. They're better than the Adobe-type guides since they provide both the pull-out guides and the auto-alignment variety. Incidentally, I wonder how "crisp" they are, and whether they're a little transparent to see what's underneath them a little better. I'll have to make a trip to either the Apple Store upstate or see if CompUSA has any copies running this weekend.
by
Anonymous Coward
on Friday January 10, @01:27AM (#6841)
would be a review of Keynote. I'm on the fence on this one, I hate powerpoint, but I rarely ever use it. However I do like the thought that I can export movies from Keynote, and that I could use it to put together informational videos and splice feed with iMovie or Final Cut Express. However, being short on cash, I dont know, is this a good product? Has any body found a good review of this product yet?
by
Anonymous Coward
on Friday January 10, @06:20AM (#6843)
Imported a ~120MB PowerPoint (Office XP) file, and the use of Quartz for the transitions just blows away those of PowerPoint.
I haven't played with Keynote other than that, so I don't know how its authoring capabilities stack up to PowerPoint.
Maybe I'll see what happens with Visual Basic for Applications under Keynote...
thanks for taking a good whack at the format. I am glad it is pretty open, it will be interesting to see what tools will enhance this program. I am not much for presentation software, but this might get me over the fence.
I do have a question
The tcl/tk crowd has a wiki at wiki.tcl.tk for technical information. Does the Apple crowd have some equivelant place to put information like this that could be expanded upon (programming examples, tools, etc.) ???
I dropped the Keynote presentation file onto BBEdit not realizing it was a package. BBEdit opens the directory and displays it for you to browse. Choose the 'presentation.apxl' file and it is nicely colored and formatted XML.
I used the 'f' menu to see that it contains 17 shadow styles, 9 dash styles, and 11 master slides, then the slide-list section with my test slides (about 4800 lines into the file), then the state of the UI.
I hate having that much boilerplate stuff. I've suggested to Apple that they allow the importation of a simplified XML file that just contains the slide-list part and adds the slides with the current style/theme into the current presentation.
Most of the XML appears to be in the .plist format used extensively in OS X. It seems like much of it was done by simply serialising the Cocoa objects used in the presentation. For example there seem to be several NSFonts and NSColors in there, mainly stored in NSDictionarys and NSArrays. This would make it very easy for other Cocoa applications to read the file format.
First, Powerpoint does allow export to quicktime (although I've never tried it.)
I do use powerpoint regularly, and have found it to be pretty good for a microsoft product, which is not the same thing as pretty good. :) However, it doesn't have anything LIKE the features of Keynote. Oddly enough, the feature I am most interested in is the alignment guides! Alignment is a persistent pain in the you-know-what with PP.
I preach, and am hoping to get a copy of Keynote to try next week. I really wish Apple would put up a demo version so I could see how it works before I spend $100 on it.
by
Anonymous Coward
on Friday January 10, @09:35AM (#6954)
I just looked and found shadows pretty quickly :).. It's in the inspector under the "Graphic Inspector"... It's not a graphic, but apparently you can use a lot of the inspector features for a lot of different objects.. Look under shadow, you can customize the shadow like crazy :)
by
Anonymous Coward
on Friday January 10, @06:26PM (#22795)
Does XML handle the transitions also?
What I would like to see is a chalk-blur-erase transition for the chalkboard background! Is this possible to write? From the Keynote Talk, I assume you can create your own Styles.
by
Anonymous Coward
on Friday January 10, @01:56PM (#22825)
If you are familiar with LaTeX, you should give Equations Service a try and see if it works for you. Equations are the principle reason I don't use PowerPoint since they look awful. Another alternative for you might be Math+Magic. Unfortunately, software like this is written for business people, not technical people.
I agree, the potential to add presentation-esq stuff to iMovies seems pretty cool. I don't use presentation software that much (and I don't use macs at work anyway) But for my personal videos, I think Keynote could really add some nice possibilities.
I received my copy of Keynote just two hours before my PowerPoint presenta tion was due at MacWorld. Installed Keynote and imported my presentation. The import went pretty smoothly, but I was pretty amazed that the resulting file was 11x larger than the exact same PowerPoint file. That's XML for you. No reason this couldn't be gzipped on the fly, like VRML. Wonder why they didn't implement it with compression - they probably will in the future. In the end I backed off and ran with the PowerPoint - the Demo Gods don't like to be surprised.
Actually, I was very impressed by the fact that Keynote saves its files as XML. There are some interesting possabilities this provides. If, for example, your company does a lot of presentations, and needs current sales data and so on in those presentations, you could save the XML code of a presentation in your database app, and offer the ability to build a new one with updated data every time a rep needed to do a presentation. Heck, even roll an AppleScript to save the updated presentation as a QuickTime movie, cron the whole thing, and you can be sure your product's demos on your website are alway current.
Just a few ideas on what such an open format as XML provides.
by
Anonymous Coward
on Friday January 10, @09:27AM (#24137)
I also have Keynote in hand. I am a college professor and I took a stab at converting 2 powerpoint lectures to keynote last night in hopes of using them today. Most everything transferred well enough for me to play around with Keynote's features. Keynote is definitely more capable thanf PP in terms of producing nicer looking presentations. Some failures I see (and this is because I am a science teacher) is that superscripts, as in Appleworks, don't scale properly. You have to manually select them and change the font size via trial and error. Secondly, I was forced to use Office's equation editor for inputing equations. Also, I could only get shadowed text by selecting an Apple supplied theme that had it and then editing that theme. Maybe I just don't know yet how to set this up. Powerpoint does seem to have some better text options with regards to those three points. For most people though, none of them may seem an issue. On the plus side, Keynote is much simpler to use (even though I already am used to PP!). I get the feeling with a little more playing, I could produce slides very very rapidly that look fantastic. For those of you who have commented on the presentation size: It may shrink somewhat by compression but probably not much. Apple uses high quality tiffs to save artwork and images. That is partly why it looks so much better. Those suckers will not compress much. PP uses jpeg for just about everything (which is why Apple probably did not have too tough a time making a converter). Low quality jpeg at that. I am not going to bitch too much about my presentations now being 4 or 5 meg when they used to be in the hundreds of k. Cheers.
by
Anonymous Coward
on Friday January 10, @07:20AM (#24143)
I can say that even without bias, the little that I've seen of Keynote impresses me far more (and seems far more intuitive and powerful) than the little that I've seen of powerpoint. If you think about it, this is the kind of app that just comes naturally in Cocoa.. Most of the work was already done for them, all they had to do was piece it all together.. Things like quicktime integration, support for all the graphics formats, PDF, alpha channels, etc. That was all done for them already (albeit it was still written by them or NeXT at some point :)).. I guarantee that MUCH MUCH more work went into powerpoint than went into Keynote. And at the same time, I'm betting Keynote is the better solution for most people.
by
Anonymous Coward
on Friday January 10, @11:19AM (#24172)
Our copy just came FedEx this morning, and I can tell you it is easily worth 100 bucks. First of all, your objects have sizes, in pixels, and can be aligned. That alone is worth the price if you are used to Powerpoints inaccuracy. You can create as many masters as you want, and name them whatever. Wonderful! The interface is very intuitive. I imported my corporate powerpoint presentation, and it basically came in without trouble. Their is some text formatting and picture formatting stuff that changed, but I can fix that easily enough. I love the file format. All the images are in a big folder, and I have a xml file that lists the contents of the slides. I can't wait till they release an XLST for FMP so I can generate slides right out of my FileMaker database. This product is sweet, it is everything that PowerPoint isn't. Transparency, Shadows, Unlimited Guides, its all good.
by
Anonymous Coward
on Friday January 10, @08:07PM (#24233)
I have to admit that I was extremely impressed by the demo of Keynote. The slide themes and transitions look beautiful, and the support for many graphic formats is great. I have two questions for those people who've gotten their hands on it:
1) Can you import adobe illustrator files directly, or do they need to be converted to PDF in order to be imported? (As a f/u, if it does import AI files directly, can you manipulate all of the objects or layers independently?)
2) Has anyone tried exporting a keynote document back into powerpoint? A lot of scientific conferences still ask you to submit your slides as a powerpoint document. I don't imagine that the slides will look as good, or have all the fancy transitions, but is it "good enough" or do you then need to work extensively on cleaning-up the file for powerpoint?
Thanks!
Yes, you must save Illustrator files as PDF. You must save Photoshop files as multi-layer TIFF if you want to import with layers.
I haven't tried export to PPT, but did go to several scientific sites and randomly downloaded six PPT files. Of those:
* 4 loaded pretty-much intact, though title fonts tended to be way oversized and clipped. Probably because I don't have the font that was originally used and Windows uses 96 dpi instead of 72 dpi as their font basis.
* 1 didn't load at all.
* 1 loaded, but consistently got an error (and wouldn't display) on one slide.
