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Ever wonder what Apple uses to put on those wondrous Steve Jobs Keynotes? With a new piece of software appropriately titled Keynote, you too can be Steve Jobs and give slick presentations to adoring crowds. (Reality Distortion Field(tm) not included). Keynote is billed as a next generation presentation tool to compile multimedia slide presentations. The software includes 12 bundled themes plus backgrounds, fonts, and other accessories. The software features the ability to resize images, animate charts/tables with cinematic-quality transitions. Plus, Keynote features the ability to import and export presentations to/from PowerPoint, QuickTime and PDF.

"Using Keynote is like having a professional graphics department to create your slides," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "This is the application to use when your presentation really counts."


Powering Keynote is OS X's underlaying technology Quartz 2D and OpenGL 3D engines. Using the graphics support from OS X, Keynote can incorporate anti-aliased text, transparencies, drop shadows and cinematic-quality transitions into presentations. Users can also import QuickTime movies and audio with their presentation for placement within Keynote. Apple boasts that not only will Keynote offer the ability to make spiffy presentations, but will do so with an intuitive and simple interface.

Keynote is available now for $99 and was handed out for free to attendees of Tuesday's SteveNote. The software requires Mac OS X 10.2, with 10.2.3 recommended, a G3 processor and 256 MB of ram plus 8 MB of video RAM.

Analysis:

Microsoft's PowerPoint and Apple's own AppleWorks tools are sorely lacking for anything beyond "functional." Personally when I need to make a slide show presentation, I usually make up a QuickTime movie and step through it frame by frame. Back in the day Kai's PowerShow was an interesting alternative, but that has fallen on the way side. Apple's Keynote will be a refreshing application, and perhaps even sell a few laptops for those presentation warriors.