My first impressions of Keynote is a good one. When I bought the iWork suite I didn't know what to expect. The first impression I had of Pages, the word processing application of the suite, was sort of disappointing. I didn't think it really matched up to Mircrosoft Word feature wise and there are other free alternatives, like Open Office for Mac. My first impression of Keynote is good though. It seems very easy to use and intuitive. I have a MOS certification for PowerPoint 2007 and it wasn't an easy program to learn. Unfortunately most people who are going to use a "presentation" program are not going to be professional clerical workers who work all day long in an office suite or people who will suffer through a certification process. Keynote was very point and click, drag and drop, and seemingly easy to use. The one feature that I loved was the ability to use an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad as a controller during a presentation. How cool would that be to give a presentation with a controller like an iPhone or an iPad? I was even told that the iPad can run a cut down version of Keynote and use something like Apple TV to stream a presentation straight to a TV in a conference room during a presentation. Pretty slick showing up to a presentation with Apple products to show off. Well, I can see some problems that I need to research.
First of all where will the content come from that will be on the slides? Will the content come from Word documents or Excel spreadsheets? How does Keynote integrate that kind of content? Are you going to recycle and update an old presentation made in PowerPoint ? If the content is original and created from scratch Keynote will have no problems but if it is coming from other sources what will that be like? That will definitely be a project for me to try. One of the problems of the One to One tutorial sessions is that these kind of compatibility issues are not easily addressed. The One to One tutorials are designed to teach and showcase Apple products. "Integration" issues are kind of out of the scope of these sessions but for an office productivity suite they are important if you are trying to train or sell them to businesses. I think Keynote would be perfect for a school teacher or a small business person who will be their sole content creation source. How well Keynote will be in a corporate environment where work is recycled from old sources and done in a collaborative way is a question I will have to research later. I also think that Apple has a little bit of a compatibility problem in giving presentations at the hardware level. On MacBooks and iPads Apple uses proprietary connections for external hookups to screens or projectors. In the future this might not be an issue. If Thunderbolt takes off then Apple will be ahead of the PC world and connections will be made via a Thunderbolt interface, but right now Apple users need to carry several adapter dongles with them to connect to a projector. The other problem is that the Apple user will have to be self supporting. I have seen a couple of presenters who have struggled with conference room equipment and have to rely on support staff from the company they are visiting. If those tech support staff don't understand Apple then let's hope that the presenter is either knowledgeable on their own or can phone in and be talked through technical issues. I think Keynote unfortunately suffers from the proprietary nature of Apple hardware and software. If Keynote could be run from a PC I think it would have a chance of competing for the business market and be a preferred product for business users. I guess the best compliment I could give Keynote is that I wish for a PC version of the software. But because it is locked in the Apple world it suffers from hardware and software compatibility issues that keep it from being great. Keynote is kind of like a great band that only plays locally and never records their music or tours outside their region.
I definitely want to play with this program some more to see how it stacks up to PowerPoint and how it is compatible with other content sources. Its ease of use and cool presentation control options make me want to make it work in the real world. Will the effort be worth it? Hopefully it will...stay tuned.
