Keynote 1.1: Worth the Price?

- 2003.11.06

I recently sprung for a copy of Keynote at my local Apple Store (US$99 retail, $79 education-online only) and found that it has compelling features that make it a great alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint. It certainly provides the best looking presentations, in terms of the finished product, on any computer platform. Unfortunately, these features are probably not enough to compensate for basic functions that are missing or to justify the price unless you're a professional presenter.

The system requirements for Keynote start at OS X 10.2, so older Mac users still running OS 9 are out of luck.

The features in the transitions are such that I doubt they would be adaptable to OS 9 anyway. I think Apple might be better served providing the program in a limited way for OS 9 users, with all the transition effect OS 9 can't support grayed out. That way OS 9 users get a nice presentation program, OS 9 users are nudged toward OS X, Apple makes more money in a wider audience, and everyone wins.

Keynote has some hints of characteristics inherited from the primitive slide show feature found in AppleWorks 6, such as the fact that it defaults to slide-based editing when you first open it, and has few (if any) options available for playing your presentation. In fact, AppleWorks has more options for how the show is presented (timed automatic delays for kiosk mode) than Keynote, so there are some serious deficiencies here.

Seeing as how the slide presentation function in AppleWorks is crude and clumsy, even in comparison to PowerPoint, some users are going to find that Keynote just isn't going to cut it.

If you put in every function every user wants, you'll wind up with a Microsoft product. That's called "providing options" in press releases* and "feature bloat" in reviews. I'm not talking feature bloat here. I'm talking basic functionality that's been available in products like Astound! since the early 1990s.

*For example, this is Microsoft's criticism of iTunes: It doesn't "provide options" for users to use crappy MP3 players.

The slide building interface continues the object-oriented "inspector-based" theme I first encountered in Freehand years ago. A user will have to click on the "Text" button to add a text object to the screen, then click on "Fonts" (which also has a capital A as an icon, a poor user interface choice if you ask me) to change the characteristics of the text you've just typed. You must then click a third time on "inspector" (which has the informative "i" as an icon - next time try a microscope) in order to change such things as the kerning of the words or the spacing of lines in a block of text.

This feels clumsy and counterintuitive. On the other hand, it's no worse than PowerPoint, which has become exponentially more difficult to use with age.

Another feature I find particularly useful that is missing from Keynote is scatterplot graphs in the graphing function. Obviously there were no science majors present for the development of the graphing module; only business-types, social scientists, and USA Today use bar charts and line plots where one axis is categories instead of values. It disturbs me vaguely that this was originally Steve Jobs' personal software and that's the only kind of graph he ever talks about. This function is effectively useless for physical science students, and I won't deploy Keynote in student machines until it is added in.

Welcome changes from the old AppleWorks presenter include a functional outline mode, master slides that can be applied to all or a portion of a presentation, and the ability to directly edit bullet point graphics. This is a whole new product, after all, not a new version of an old one, and Keynote shines in two areas especially - the appearance of content on the screen and transitions.

Text now appears smooth, unlike the jagged effects you get in PowerPoint if you pick the wrong font. Inserted content such as photos and graphs can be emphasized with a beautiful shadowing effect that looks like it was done externally to the program by high-powered graphics software and imported (which would be required in PowerPoint, I think). Resizing works in a simple, reasonable way, and you can adjust your text several ways to fit into the available space.

Longtime PowerPoint users will complain about the lack of choices in transitions and the fact that sounds are not available to assign to clicking events, builds, and transitions. I say good riddance. The only people who use the sound effects are middle school students; professionals don't use them as far as I have seen because they distract from the message.

Also, just because you can do a transition doesn't mean it looks good. There are even some in Keynote that I think are superfluous, but you've got to draw the line somewhere, right?

It seems inconsistent for me to complain of some missing features and not mind others, but all reviews are judgment calls anyway. Reviews are just opinions, I have mine, and that's it.

The transitions that are included with the program include the popular Cube Rotation transition that I understand is used in Panther's fast user switching function. It looks great and even elicited some gasps from my student audience that has been using PowerPoint in schools for years. All the transitions I tested on a 1 GHz TiBook (the slowest PowerBook available today runs at 1 GHz, so my TiBook is now officially "low end" - can you believe it?) were smooth. They include a subtle acceleration effect never seen in PowerPoint that makes the transition start slowly, accelerate to its maximum speed, and then slow down just before ending. No one has mentioned this in any review I've seen, it's subtle, and it looks fantastic.

I found the appearance of the presentation so compelling that I felt as if the purchase price was justified. For other users, I'm not so sure the price point is set correctly. I think a retail price of about $50 would be more appropriate, especially considering the effect of market penetration on the large groups that will see the final presentations. But I'm not privy to the development costs Apple is trying to recover, and you got to pay the bills. Perhaps when the product's ROI is sufficient to justify it they can drop the price a bit. In it's present state, it's worth a look but not going to displace PowerPoint overnight.