I did a presentation yesterday, and decided to give Keynote a ride, seeing how it behaves as compared to PowerPoint.
I had a few major issues with embedding videos that I’ll either find ways of resolving, or I’ll just dismiss the program as child’s tool.
First of all, when adding several videos in full DV resolution to the presentation, it is absolutely hopeless that they are embedded in the file, rather than being linked to the location of the videos at the disks. I wouldn’t mind this being default behavior as long as it was simple and straight forward to override and rather link.
I have ended up with a file weighting in at 1.11 Gb, while PowerPoint files generally weight in at less than 50 Mb. And the 1.11 Gb size makes absolutely no sense to me, the videos are larger, and I did not embed enough images to warrant this file size.
File saving is slow, as in taking 10 min. How are you supposed to cope with that if preparing a presentation in a hurry?
Finally, I am not impressed with movie playback. I have never had interlace issues using PowerPoint, but in Keynote it was severe.
I’ll see if I can find the time to do more systematic tests sometime in the future, and also check up on the manual. But unless I get this sorted out, it’s back to PowerPoint.
It’s a bit surprising that the office suites available have not made any major inventions in the last 10 years. I was teaching the MS Office Suite back in 1999, and somehow none of the programs seems to have gotten any further since then, they have just gotten cluttered with stuff that’s not all that useful.
What about adopting a Scrivener approache to creative writing, DarkRoom possibilities for focused content development, LaTeX like possibilities for separation of text and typesetting, the Omni way of structuring content, mind maps, scripting of media content, or web 2.0 integration? Or at least being able to properly deal with references…?
