In my computer technology class, we’re looking at the fancy features of Keynote this week. Keynote is similar to PowerPoint, it makes slide shows.
I’m well versed in both google doc slide shows and PowerPoint slide shows, at least until PP2007. The work flow in Keynote is similar to PowerPoint, but the variety of tools and effects are much better.
The first unique tool I found in Keynote was the alpha tool. Basically, you can import images into your slide show. Often they have a solid color background. You might want to remove them and to do so you can use the alpha tool and fine tune the background-color into transparent. It’s really handy. Photoshop should implement a similar feature. It’s that handy.
The other unique tool I found was the entire effect suite. The effects in PowerPoint 2003 are, at best, outdated if not ancient. Keynote offers beautiful effects. My favorite is called Sparkle.
I think that Microsoft has lost an edge when it comes to presentations. I never used Keynote before this week although I’ve known of it all along. The problem is Keynote isn’t avaiable for Windows. Thus, there is a huge audiance who would love to have Keynote out there but they are also unable to use it since they can’t get a Mac with Keynote (which seems to the story for a lot of mac software).