Woohoo!

· technology ·

I did my first presentation with Keynote today! I hurriedly converted my old lectures to Keynote format once it had eventually arrived (note: does anyone know why we shouldn't be able to download paid-for Apple software immediately, then receive the boxed version at a later point?) To be honest, I was a bit nervous about it after I noticed on MacUser that some people have had kernel panics (of all things) in the middle of Keynote presentations. Gulp. There would be utter derision from the Mac-hating students in the audience: "Call that a stable [UNIX]{.caps} core!". However, I haven't personally had any problems with stability, so I thought I'd risk it (though I must admit that I exported to Powerpoint — just in case, you understand). I crossed my fingers and got there very early to test it out with the data projector. I'm glad to say that it all went swimmingly. This may be because I was somewhat conservative (note small "c") with the fancy-pants 3D transitions, and our data projector is set to run at 800-600, so it wasn't exactly taxing my 32MB of [VRAM]{.caps}.

I must say that I'm pretty impressed with Keynote so far. Granted, there are a few things missing at the moment, but I didn't miss them much. You can add lovely LaTeX typeset equations with Equation Service, and OmniGraffle does a great job of producing lovely diagrams and so on. I found that the PowerPoint import and export worked very nicely. The main thing is that the main tools you need are easily accessible, unlike with PowerPoint, where they tend to be buried under a ton of menus. Plus it makes me one step closer to a Microsoft-free nirvana. I did, though, have to physically restrain myself from adding a "One more thing…" slide at the end.