iWork Update Better Than Previously Thought?
It would seem that not everyone is excited about the new iWork updates. The two applications in Apples new iWork suite are the same as before, Pages and Keynote, and it ships for a fee of $79 (single license, $99 for the family pack) without an upgrade option. Taking this into account, that is a relatively large amount of money to spend every year on what Steve Jobs only appeared to describe as some template designs.
robg of Mac OS X Hints has other ideas however. He has extensive knowledge of Keynote through his work related presentations and has always had one gripe with the software.
Since I do a lot of presenting, I was most interested in the changes in Keynote, and whether they would address my number one gripe with the program. My gripe has to do with bulleted lists; namely, that when you have a bulleted list on a slide, you can (a) only have one such list per slide, and (b) you can’t do anything else while those bullets were appearing on the screen. Assume the first bullet in a list is “Mail’s new interface look,” for instance, followed by “iTunes’ new video features.” In prior versions of Keynote, you couldn’t insert a screenshot of the Mail interface after the first bullet, then have the screenshot vanish before the second bullet. This led to all sorts of stupid workarounds, most of which involved duplicating large numbers of slides.
In Apple’s booth Tuesday after the keynote, a rep demonstrated that Apple had fixed my gripe in Keynote 3. You can have as many bulleted lists on a slide as you like, and you can now do things during the bullet builds. Since my presentation wasn’t until Thursday, I went to the Apple retail store in San Francisco and bought a copy of iWork. I then spent much of my free time on Tuesday and Wednesday updating my presentations to take advantage of the new Keynote 3 bullet building feature (and inserting some of the nice new slide transitions). I found Keynote 3 to be a great improvement over the prior version, and hence, iWork earns this week’s Pick of the Week on the merits of Keynote alone.
It would appear that for those of us with iWork ‘05, but without proper experience of it there is a lesson to be learned. Not everything is always as it seems, and if you plan on giving presentations in the future, it may be worth the purchase (or convincing your boss of the purchase) for the more hidden and back end features.
