About two years passed between versions 1.0 and 2.0 of Apple’s challenger to PowerPoint on the Mac platform. It’s now been three years since Keynote 5.0 came out on January 6, 2009. Since then, Keynote has been released for iOS, first for the iPad then for the smaller screens of the iPhone and iPod touch. OS X has been updated twice (Snow Leopard and Lion). Microsoft PowerPoint has received one major update with rumors of an App Store version on the way, and iBooks Author was just released with obvious iWork influences. Through all of this, the entire iWork suite has remained conspicuously untouched, disregarding some minor point releases.

iWork is not Apple’s first attempt to create a productivity suite for their users who want an alternative to Microsoft Office. Prior to iWork there was ClarisWorks,  created by Apple subsidiary Claris and rebranded in its later years as AppleWorks. ClarisWorks didn’t have a presentation module until its final version, released in 2000, which was also later ported to run on OS X. From 2000 until it was discontinued in 2007, AppleWorks saw no major updates – only point releases.

Keynote was released in 2003, and many correctly took that as the proverbial writing on the wall for AppleWorks. Pages came out in 2005, and Numbers would come out one year after AppleWork’s official demise. Now, with Keynote having gone three years without any significant updates, some Keynote users are asking if the well-loved software is on its way out.

I don’t think so. Not yet at any rate.

First, when AppleWorks was on its way out, not only did it not receive any new version numbers for seven years, but it also went a couple years without any point updates. Keynote (and the other iWork apps) just recently saw three point releases in 2011 that brought it up to speed with OS X Lion’s new features as well as fixed several bugs, improved Office compatibility, and even added a couple of builds – Anvil and Fall Apart. While iWork may be on the back burner, that doesn’t sound like a product that’s reached the end of its life on the desktop.

Then there’s the support for Keynote files in iBooks Author:

Not only is Keynote supported by the interactive books created by iBooks Author, but Keynote files are the only presentation files accepted by the application. Additionally, iBooks Author is a Mac application, meaning killing the desktop version of Keynote while maintaining the iOS version would hamper this functionality. While iBooks Author may have taken development time away from Keynote, it may breathe new life into sales of Apple’s presentation software.

That said, I do think iWork for Mac OS X will eventually be discontinued in favor of putting full support behind the iOS version, but, by then, chances are that iOS will be Apple’s primary OS with OS X falling into the same category that OS 9 was a decade ago. When we see a MacBook Air or iMac shipping with a touchscreen and a version of iOS (let’s say iOS X for fun) as its primary operating system, then we can start worrying about the future of Keynote on Mac OS X.

Of course I reserve the right to be completely and totally wrong.

Filed under: Uncategorized ]]> http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/whither-keynote/feed/ 0 simplyrobert Keynote-icon Appleworks-6.0-wordproc-mac Keynote-in-iBoosAuthor http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/link-mobile-apps-for-creatives/ http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/link-mobile-apps-for-creatives/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:13:46 +0000 simplyrobert http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/?p=1822 Continue reading »

Duarte Blog: 10 Mobile Apps for Highly Creative People

I haven’t had the opportunity to try very many creative apps for tablets, but Steve Wishman has a nice roundup of interesting tools on the Duarte blog. I’m especially taken with the Light Table Pro-Series Alpha: Championship Edition.

Filed under: Link List Tagged: tools ]]>

2011 only saw 28 new posts to this site, not quite catching up with 2010′s 32 posts and staying pretty far away from the high of 54 in 2007. On the other hand, I think a small decline in posts is natural in such a narrow subject matter.

In positive news, traffic was way up. 2011 now represent nearly half of all traffic this site has seen. Hopefully, that’s a sign that I’m doing something right, and I’d like to reward my readers with more content. I’d still like to give Android and the iPad more attention, but I feel stuck on those categories until I can get some hardware in my hands. Without actual devices, I have to rely on others’ research or on supposition.

I still have quite a few presentations and sermons of my own I could share here as well as a number of posts sitting in my Drafts folder. I’m looking forward to a strong 2012 here on Simply Presentation, and I hope you keep coming back to visit.

Filed under: Uncategorized ]]> http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/2011-retrospective/feed/ 0 simplyrobert 2011Retrospective.001 http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/link-make-a-powerful-point/ http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/link-make-a-powerful-point/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 07:55:16 +0000 simplyrobert http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/?p=1814 Continue reading »

Make a Powerful Point

I just discovered this blog (thanks to comments on this site) by Gavin McMahon, and it’s all bout using effective visuals in your presentations as well as disciplining your style and message. It’s good stuff, and I highly recommend perusing his material.

Filed under: Link List ]]>

Opinionated Type has collected a wonderful list of great new fonts. My personal favorites are Ideal Sans, FF Spinoza, and Maiola Book Weight.

In other news, you really should subscribe to Opinionated Type…but that’s just my opinion.

Here’s what I settled on in the end:

The trick was showing a definite change in employment rates while not distorting the changes to make them seem overly dramatic the way Media Matters did when they presented their own alternative which set the baseline close to 8.5 and the high end at 9.3. That creates a very dramatic shift in figures moving by tenths of percents.

I’m not a fan of this result because of the over-accentuated changes from pint value to point value. I might point out that this is very close to Keynote’s automatic formatting for the data.

My fist instinct when creating an alternate graph was to put it on a zero to ten scale.

The end result demonstrates little in the way of progress, and it also creates a very pessimistic view of the data – as if that ten percent mark denotes the end of all employment in the United States. This visual looks like it’s trying to push an ideological narrative.

For fun, then, I set the data range from zero to one hundred. After all, since employment figures are stated as percents, they’re being measured against a hundred-point scale.

Again, change is all but invisible, and this graph makes our unemployment problem seem very insignificant indeed. It looks slanted to me despite being completely accurate.

What I finally settled on was the same eight to ten range the original Fox News infographic used (only with all the data points in the right place). It shows a definite change in data without painting a picture that it either too optimistic or too pessimistic. It creates contrast without exaggeration.

Even when creating a simple graph, be thoughtful. Don’t rely on the default, but present the data in a way that is clear but does not intentionally distort or exaggerate the data.

Do you see what’s wrong with the graph? Here – let me help.

Notice how that 8.6% at the end of the graph is exactly even with all three 9.0% marks? You can also see how it’s placed higher than March’s 8.8%. It’s a mess. It’s careless at best and downright dishonest at worst.

Media Matters presented this alternative to the chart, but I’m not sure it’s really much better.

image from Media Matters for America

I think Media Matter’s solution goes to the other extreme. Instead of making that 8.6% in November look artificially high, by putting 8.6 too close to the baseline it creates a disproportionately low impression of that figure.

Instead, I propose something like this:

I’ve written on this theme a few of times now: keep your slides honest. Don’t present accurate data in a way that skews perception. Don’t use faulty data. Be honest and straightforward with your audience, or risk losing credibility. Make sure your data is accurate; then make sure you present in a clear and honest way – even when the data doesn’t fit perfectly into the narrative you want.

You want a reputation as an honest and competent individual. Make sure that honesty and competency is reflected in the visuals you create.

Now, as far as I can tell, Einstein didn’t really say this, though Einstein: His Life and Times (Clark, 1971) does attribute a similar quote to the famous scientist. In the book, Clark writes:

Einstein…said “that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart ought to lend themselves to so simple a description that even a child could understand them.”

Whoever said it, the concept is true. If you can’t explain your topic to a non-expert, then you need to study it more. Presenting is about sharing ideas to as many people as possible in a way that they can understand your message and do something with it.

Remember the film An Inconvenient Truth, in which Al Gore talked about climate change? In 20/20 hindsight, it’s not hard to find flaws in that presentation, but the big success of the film was that he presented climate change science in a way that everyone – supporters, skeptics, or deniers – could wrap their heads around and understand.

Simplicity is not about simple-mindedness. It does not have to do with dumbing-down the material. It is not about avoiding complex topics. It’s about presenting that information – regardless of depth or complexity – in a way that people can easily grasp. It’s about being an effective communicator.

Here are some quick and easy ways to bring simplicity to your talk:

• Tell stories. When I talk about autism, it’s story time. People grasp the abstract qualities of the autistic mind when seen through the eyes of characters and events so much more than through bulleted lists. Put a human face on the facts.
• Find analogies. I’ll always remember the importance of hands-on technology training because of something Arthur C. Clarke once wrote: “Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.”  Relate to what your audience knows, to what is familiar for them.
• Be visual and tactile. Let me see what you’re talking about. Let me experience your data. Engage more senses than hearing, and your audience has more chances to come away with a deeper understanding of your talk. Think of the ways Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, or Bill Nye explain complex scientific concepts. Visual and tactile learning to them are as important as auditory.

I just want to finish here with a video narrated by Carl Sagan. See how the visuals compliment his talk, explaining how the space program has affected us and some of the reasons for our abandonment of that program. Notice how deep his message is without descending into complex vocabulary or esoteric language.

Visuals and text align to create an emotional and provocative image. The historical impact of space exploration doesn’t have to be rocket science, and neither does your talk. Keep it meaningful, but keep things simple at the same time. It starts, though, with really understanding your material, and that takes time and preparation. You do the hard work, so your audience doesn’t have to.

Nancy Duarte has posted six tips for presenting with an interpreter, and it’s definitely worth checking out. I’ve never had to give a presentation with an interpreter, but I have taught and have conducted parent conferences with interpreters before, and every one of these tips still apply.

It should almost go without saying, but getting your facts right can make or break your presentation. You can present the most convincing case in the world for your position, product, or idea. If you get basic facts wrong, however, it hurts your legitimacy and your argument. Now, there will be those who will agree or disagree with you no matter what evidence you have or lack. They’re not my concern. My concern is for those whose minds can be changed, but will shut me out the moment it’s evident I didn’t do my homework.

I’ve written before about a guy who came to talk to our staff during one of my first few years teaching. One of the thrusts in his talk was the role of technology in education, and he spent a good amount of time convincing us that he knew more about technology than we did. There were a few things that bugged me about his talk, but he then put up a slide comparing a 60 GB iPod photo to the original 5 GB iPod. Under the 5 GB iPod, he had a price of $499, and he put a price of $99 under the 60 GB iPod photo. Short version: he got both wrong.

Um, no.

I think I made some audible noise of disbelief at the time. The price of the original, I had to double check later. It was $399 – the later-introduced 10 GB version was $499. As for the second price, $99 was the price for the 512 MB iPod shuffle introduced earlier that year. At that time, the 60 GB model was $399. A simple Wikipedia visit would have helped him with the price of the original, and simply going to Apple’s online store would have given him current prices. Instead, here he was trying to be an authority on technology, and he couldn’t get iPod prices right.

We see stuff like this all the time in political rhetoric, in science denial, in marketing spins. Some of it is even on purpose, people hoping their audience won’t double check their misreported facts. Again, some will take anything you say at face value. Some will accept nothing you say. But you score no points among those in the middle when you stubbornly get basic facts wrong. Sometimes you’ll make mistakes. I’ve made plenty. In the end, though, being detail-oriented will help prevent many problems, and being willing to be honest with ourselves about hard facts will help us make more informed pitches, arguments, and proposals.

Filed under: Philosophy Tagged: impressions, preparation ]]> http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/devil-in-the-details/feed/ 1 simplyrobert Details-02 Details.001 http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/dont-settle/ http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/dont-settle/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 01:05:59 +0000 simplyrobert http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/?p=1754 Continue reading »

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary…

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

- Steve Jobs at Stanford University, 2005

Filed under: Philosophy Tagged: steve jobs ]]> http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/dont-settle/feed/ 2 simplyrobert http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/bad-presentation-bingo/ http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/bad-presentation-bingo/#comments Mon, 19 Sep 2011 02:42:20 +0000 simplyrobert http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/?p=1750 Continue reading »

]]> The Illinois Science Council recently published a somewhat humorous document called Bad Presentation Bingo, filled with 24 habits of ineffective presenters. After glancing over the first page of the document, the second delivers some rationale about why you should avoid some of those habits.

From the document:

For the good of science, you are strongly encouraged to continually improve your communication skills just as you would your research. Please practice being a good presenter and avoid bad presentation habits – especially when speaking to a non-scientific audience. The future of science funding depends on good communication to non-scientists.

This is true of any field. Good education funding depends on being able to communicate needs to people who are not steeped in the world of education. Good arts funding requires the aid of non-artists. Medical research depends on the wealth of people who are not doctors or surgeons.

Being an effective communicator means you can explain your ideas to people who have different interests and expertise. A preacher never gets far by directing his message to the choir, so think about that next time you have opportunity to present your passions and ideas to others. Will they get it? If not, how can you communicate it better?

While you’re working on that, be sure to give Bad Presentation Bingo a download.

Filed under: Delivery Tagged: impressions, speaking ]]> http://simplypresentation.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/bad-presentation-bingo/feed/ 0 simplyrobert PresBingo

Instead of competing with Keynote, Presentation Link complements Keynote by allowing you to quickly create non-linear presentations by simply dropping in various forms of media. It seems like a good app, and App Store reviews have been very positive. You can read more on the developer’s website, and it’s available in the App Store for $7.99.

This is a post about Word Art and how to use it if you aren’t using PowerPoint for your presentations. If you are prone to fits of aesthetic rage, care about good design or could potentially care about good design in the future, you should probably not read this post. It’s not so much that Word Art is an evil entity of itself so much as it is often used in evil ways. It is a worse result of PowerPoint culture than Clip Art and bullet points combined, and even Clippy™ hides his face from the inhumanity of it.

So why am I writing about a tool to help with Word Art? In truth, I’ve used it on rare occasions when I’ve used Keynote to create multimedia projects or slides that aren’t intended for the pulpit, classroom, or boardroom. Also, Keynote (for good reason) contains no tools for creating Word Art. Before progressing down this path, you should study this flowchart and determine whether or not you really want to do this:

Still with me? Okay, let’s venture down this path together. Be wary, though. There is much potential for harm along this treacherous road…

On To Art Text

In seriousness, though, you might find yourself in a situation where you want to create some simple buttons, mocked up logos, or stylized text that are outside of Keynote’s capabilities (though I admittedly rely on external tools less with each release of Keynote). Alternatively, you may want to go beyond the capabilities of Fontwork included in recent versions of OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Here is where a tool called Art Text by BeLight Software can come in.

Quite simply, Art Text is a layer-based text styling application. I discovered it while I was doing some short-lived freelancing as a web designer, and I started using it to make buttons and other typographic images for a couple of projects. It has a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s fairly accessible – especially when compared to trying similar effects in something like Photoshop. The presets range everywhere from useful and cute to downright garish, but you can dissect the templates as much as you want while working in the app.

When you launch Art Text, a Template Gallery appears with a variety of options.

Some *ahem* lovely Word Art

Some pre-made buttons

And some fake logos

Before using Art Text on a real project, I strongly recommend opening up some of the provided templates to manipulate them and get a feel for how the application thinks. It has a very unique feel, and it took me a little while to get used to the app.

Opening a new document presents you with a canvas where the text is treated like an image (and your finished product will be exported as an image). An editor window opens to alter the text from which you can control alignment, spacing, and kerning. Changing the font also opens the standard OS X font panel where you can browse your font collections as you would in Keynote or Pages.

The editor also allows for some interesting options alongside simple text editing.

You can select from a gallery of predefined shapes or icons for each layer, and the icons are divided into several useful categories. You can even import images from the Finder and include them in your project.

Art Text includes a simple vector image editor that allows you to create your own shapes to put into your project. Since Keynote (if that’s what you’re using) has it’s own simple vector editing tool, this may be of little use, but I still think it’s neat they included it.

One of the neatest (and most dangerous) features is the ability to manipulate the text you’re creating as a vector image. Some fonts are easier to work with than others in this mode, but, if you need it, this feature alone can make Art Text worth the entry price. On top of this, you can also fill the text with an image or a texture with a single click, again removing the difficulty behind a pretty desirable effect.

By using some relatively simple features, you can produce some pretty fun results, and that’s exactly where I recommend using a tool like this – in a presentation where you are having a bit of fun.

Art Text has become an indespensible part of my toolbox. Though I rarely use it, each time I launch the app, I enjoy creating in it, and I’m always pleased with the results. As a technical note, you can export your creations as PDFs, which you can drop right into Keynote and resize to your heart’s content with little fear of distortions or artifacts appearing. You can also export in a wide variety of image formats that a number of other programs will accept. It’s a nice tool, and I suggest my Mac-running readers give it a try.

Art Text is available in the Mac App Store for $19.99, and there is a free, feature-limited version available as well. Alternatively, you can download a trial and purchase the application form the developer’s website.

(Okay, it’s been my first stop the last couple of weeks at any rate.)

You have to determine a canvas size when creating a new document, but it’s easy enough to change later. If you do change the size, all elements will adjust to the new canvas (though sometimes in ways I haven’t always expected). From here, you can begin adding layers to your image as well as add filters and effects to each of those layers.

Here, I was creating a simple spotlight effect using two layers and a small variety of effects. It’s worth noting that some of the filters do not play nice together. For example, adding a stroke to the border will always follow the original image’s dimensions, meaning what you see and the border you get may not always line up. Also, DrawIt crashed every time I tried to implement a ripple effect. Still, it produced an image I was happy with, and the project was relatively painless.

Here’s the finished image dropped atop an unedited image of Elvis Costello in Keynote.

You can add these same effects to images you drop into DrawIt (but I recommend you do any necessary cropping in something else; Preview fits the bill well). In this case, I’m working on an image of Dave Matthews at his guitar.

And here he is dropped into Keynote. Not only does this process reduce the file’s size, but I was also able to add an effect I couldn’t have done in Keynote.

The biggest drawback I’ve run into is in creating text effects. My experiments for this post turned out okay, but I’ve seen it output some messy text art with pixelation and occasional artifacts. While I think DrawIt does well with image editing, the text editing can be unreliable.

Occasionally, I’ve run into a bug where I’ve had the app hang upon saving a document for the first time, leading to lost work. Because of the small issues I’ve noted throughout the post, I’d recommend downloading DrawIt’s free trial before comitting to a purchase. See if the bugs and constraints bother you. If they don’t, you have a reasonably priced, easy-to-use image editor on your hands. In fact, though I’ve concentrated on simple edits in this post, DrawIt is capable of some pretty amazing stuff, and I can think of far worse ways to spend (almost) $40. As for enhancing your text, that’s a topic for our next post.

DrawIt is available on the Mac App Store for $37.99. Alternatively, you can snag a demo and purchase it outside the App Store on the developer’s site.

Compatibility

I have to admit that PowerPoint and Keynote files are much easier to open between each other now than when the applications were younger. PowerPoint files have enough information in the file (including snapshots of your image edits) to allow programs like Keynote and Impress to open them with a decent degree of fidelity. The same is true of Keynote’s ability to export slides to PowerPoint. In fact, it’s been so long since I’ve used their compatibility features that I was pleasantly surprised while preparing images for this post.

Here’s a simple slide prepared in Kynote. Notice the inner shadows around the title text and the image of the pagoda. Also, I manipulated the image of the pagoda in Keynote to have a sepia appearance. The original image is in color.

And here we are in PowerPoint on my Mac and then in LibreOffice on our Ubuntu netbook. Since the machines don’t have all of the same fonts, the text is more of a mess in the latter image, and that text border is much more difficult to recreate here as well.

Seeing that the image of the pagoda transferred pretty well, perhaps I don’t need to create those effects in an external editor. If I want to preserve how the title looks at the bottom, however, it might be best to make a .png of that border and not rely on any program keeping that there.

Portability

Editing the images externally also saves a modest amount of storage space. If you only present on a laptop with a great deal of storage, this may not be an issue. If you keep several slide decks on a tablet, a cell phone, or a USB drive, however, those saved megabytes will start to add up.

Click to embiggen.

Between versions of the Keynote file, a twenty slide presentation lost 7.3 MB, and the PowerPoint file lost 8 MB. If you have 20 presentations stored in Keynote on your iPhone, you would be saving almost 150 MB of space on your phone – and that’s if all of your decks were only 20 slides each (but fairly image intensive). Now granted, you could save even more space by turning each slide into its own image, but you sacrifice some flexibility in how you use builds and animations. Editing all images externally saves you some space while allowing you to keep full control.

More Possibilities

Keynote only goes so far in manipulating the images placed on its slides. PowerPoint does more, but it also has its limits. Even relatively simple image editors allow you to do more. In the next couple of posts, I’ll be sharing some tools I use in creating my own presentations, and I hope you will find something useful from that collection. The posts will be fairly Mac-centric since I do all of my slide work on a Mac, so feel free to suggest and link to Windows or Linux-friendly alternatives in the comments of those posts.

Of course, there’s a certain level of obsessive-compulsivity assumed here, but you’re already hanging around on a site with a very narrow focus. I’ll assume it’s safe to be a little detail-oreinted. In the mean time, I hope you discover some new applications to try, and perhaps you’ll find the next indispensable tool for your presentation work.

She discovered in writing the chapter that PowerPoint allowed her to tell different stories than conventional fiction, to detail Alison’s segue of thoughts or to reveal the structure of small moments such as the attempts of Alison’s brother – a child with Asperger’s – to communicate his love to their father. The format also allowed her to control the pace of the story by inserting pauses in a way that can’t be properly communicated with words. A novelist can indicate via text that a pause occurred, but the reader is still actively engaged in reading those words. Instead, by visualizing a pause between the character’s thoughts and actions, PowerPoint allows the novelist to in effect stop time in the reader’s mind.

Egan believes that the PowerPoint chapter is essential to the central story of her book because it pulls the different themes together into a cohesive whole. But how well can this technique be replicated? What lessons should we draw from Egan’s use of PowerPoint?

I love novel (pun intended) approaches like this. Be sure to read the whole thing and view the accompanying slides and video.

The point is to get as close to the root of something as you can (and it’s not necessarily limited to the number five). It makes a ton of sense to me and got me asking, “Why, why, why, why, why do I present?”

Okay, So Why?

1. To share new ideas. WHY?
2. To help people improve themselves in some way. WHY?
3. So they can be better equipped to help others improve. WHY?
4. Because helping people improve themselves and giving them the tools to help others gives me a deep sense of satisfaction. WHY?
5. Because I’m an idealist, and I want to make the world a better place through the sharing of great ideas.

Like Simon, I found myself going from professional to hippy in five steps. This happens with my day job as well, but it comes out in four steps instead of five. The fact is, the details of what I do do not constitute the reason for doing it. I do what I do to share something with others, and it’s not just about slides, or creativity, or spirituality, or politics, or conservation. It’s about something bigger.

And This Has What to Do with You?

Simply put, why do you give the presentations you do? Why do you feel those talks, seminars, workshops, and pitches are important? What connection do you have to the content?

If you really understand the deeper reasons you have for presenting what you do, two big things will happen.

1. The love you have for your topic will come through more clearly, and your audience will more easily connect with the material at that level, making it more meaningful to them.
2. You’ll cut out all of the junk that doesn’t communicate those deeper reasons and give a talk that’s much more focused and relevant.

Feel free to sound off with your own set of whys in the comments. What do you like giving presentations about, but, most importantly: Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?