If you picked up a copy of iWork ’09, you might have noticed the attractive new theme chooser. You might have also noticed that custom themes and third-party themes look pretty bad in it. It’s not unusable, but if you’re as big a perfectionist as I am, the visual disparity can become grating.


Keynote’s new themes have beautiful large preview images, and you can see sample slides from the theme by mousing over the theme images.


Your custom themes will look pixelated in the new theme chooser and will contain no sample slides.

Fortunately, the fix is an easy one.

First, open a new presentation in the theme you want to convert. (For this example, I’m using the 1024x768 variation of Keynote Pro’s Barcelona theme.) Then make seven slides. If you want to follow the same pattern as Apple, they should be:

1. Title - Center (with optional image)
2. Photo - Horizontal
3. Photo - Vertical
4. Title & Bullets
5. Blank with a table
6. Blank with a bar graph
7. Blank with a pie chart

Here are examples of what I’m talking about:





Then choose “Save Theme…” from the file menu. Name it, and you’re done. That’s all there is to it. I was surprised at how simple this process is, but it can be time consuming if you have several third-party or custom themes in Keynote. Remember to back up the themes you are replacing. I’m keeping mine in a folder called Legacy Themes for safe keeping.

There are several new features in iWork ’09, and I hope to get a chance to write about some of the more prominent improvements in the coming days. In the meantime, if you have a Mac, I strongly suggest you go try out the demo. I’m not much for outright product endorsements, but I enjoy being productive with the iWork applications. You might as well.

Tags: keynote, themes

Apple has posted a short video demonstrating Keynote's compatibility with the Apple Remote that ships with most Macintosh models. The video is kept right here, and you might have to look for the title "Keynote at a Distance" if the video is not in front.



Also, did anyone else see the "Keynote '08" typo when this video was first posted? It might have just been a mistake, or...

Tags: how-to

Between Simply Gospel and Simply Presentation, I'm going to be reposting the presentations that used to be showcased on the previous version of this site. However, they are going to be a little different than before (and if you found the quasi-hidden page on the old site, you know what I'm talking about already). Instead of being a series of silently progressing slides, the presentations will be uploaded as slides with narration. This workflow came out of a podcasting experiment, so I've christened this "slidecasting." (If someone else has already come up with that word, I won't feel bad.)

The Process

Beginning in Keynote, I export all of my slides as images, checking the option to create multiple images for slides with multiple builds. These images get saved into their own folder folder, so I don't lose track of them.

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If you are using PowerPoint, you can do this by selecting "Save As..." from the File menu and choosing one of the graphics options from the list of options at the bottom of the pane. The only limitation is that separate images will not be created for slides with multiple builds.



Once the images are all saved, open iMovie and drop them all into the clips pane. From there, you can drag them into the iMovie timeline in the order you want. Once the images are in the timeline and you get recording, you may want to remove some images of text and graphics builds to simplify the process.

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If your slides pan and zoom while your video plays, this means iMovie is applying the Ken Burns effect by default. To remove this effect, select all of your clips in the timeline, and choose "Show Photo Settings" from the Photos tab of the Media pane. In the resultant dialog window, make sure "Ken Burns Effect" is unchecked.

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Finally, use the record button in the Audio tab of the Media pane to record your voice. I recommend using an external microphone, and record small portions of your talk at a time. Double-clicking a clip in the timeline allows you to edit the length of that clip to better match your voice. (In the dialog box, the time is formatted in minutes : seconds : frames.)

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Once you finish this, you're ready to export the video as a QuickTime movie and share it with the world. Just choose Share > QuickTime from the system menu and follow the instructions. You might want to perform some trial-and-error with the settings to find a result you like at a reasonable file size.

Some Limitations

• Any media embedded into the slides will not play. You can just add that media to the iMovie timeline.
  
  
• PowerPoint and Keynote slide and build animations will be lost. This isn't a big deal.
  
  
• iMovie does not have the same selection of transitions as Keynote or PowerPoint if the loss of animations bothers you.
  
  
• I'm assuming WIndows Movie Maker can do all of the iMovie steps is you are using Windows, but I have no experience with that application.

Wrapping Up

A presentation is more than just the slides and/or the handouts. You are the central figure, but the ways we usually share presentations eliminates "you" from the experience. Hopefully, this method provides you a way to share your slides in a more meaningful way with your intended audience.

Tags: software, keynote, how-to

When working in a rush or on a tight budget, Keynote is an easy solution for editing images that you might want to use in a document or on your website. You will not have near the options that you might have in an application like Photoshop, but it can be good for simple edits.

For this trick, just launch Keynote and drop the image you want to edit onto a blank slide that matches the background color the image will be placed upon. Remember, if your picture is stored in iPhoto, you can just use the Media Inspector to import the picture. Otherwise, you can drag-and-drop the picture from the directory it is stored in. Here's a quick example walkthrough of the process.

First, with the image in Keynote, mask the image. In this example, we'll mask with a shape. This involves drawing the shape. Then select both the shape and the image using shift-click or cmd-click on each.



Next, select "Mask With Shape" from the Format menu. Now adjust your image's mask. When you are happy with the results, click anywhere on the slide. Don't worry about messing up. You can always readjust the mask by double-clicking the image.



Finally, you can use the Graphic Inspector and the Adjust Image window to add shadows, borders, and reflections as well as adjust the exposure, saturation, and sharpness of the image.



There you have it. For comparison's sake, here is the original image right next to the modified image. Of course, an application like Photoshop will give you a great deal more functionality and flexibility, but Keynote is great for quick and simple image editing purposes.

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Tags: software, how-to

Some days, I feel more smart than others. The day I remembered this feature was not one of those days.

In this blog, I feel it is critically important for me to visually demonstrate what I am advocating in terms of slide design, so there are hundreds of screenshots littering the various posts in this blog. Up until recently, my process of posting sample slides has remained the same: make the slide in Keynote, enter presentation mode, take a screenshot, post on the site. This is not only needlessly complicated, but it doesn't produce good results on my MacBook Pro.

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the same slide - two different screens

Of course it all comes down to the aspect ratio, and I found myself adding another step to the process of slide shots – cropping the image. Then it hit me. This could be much, much easier. In fact, Keynote can do all the work for me.



In an open presentation, choose "Export..." from the File menu. This will cause a dialog sheet to appear with several choices: QuickTime, PowerPoint, PDF, Images, Flash, iDVD, and Safari. Choose "Images."



From here, you can choose which slide(s) you want to export, the format, and the image quality. The slides will be exported at the same resolution as the theme default. In Keynote, this will be 800x600 or 1024x768 most of the time.

Last, the slides need to be given a name, and now they are ready to be posted to a blog. (RapidWeaver allows me to scale the images down within the program. You might need to use a simple editor otherwise.) I only wish I had remembered this option months ago when I started this blog! The silver lining? I get to post a tip that might be helpful to you.

Tags: software, how-to

Like PowerPoint, Keynote lends itself well to those purely photographic experiences. Maybe it's a project for an anniversary or birthday that chronicles happy memories. Perhaps the pictures capture a significant event or milestone in one's life. Whatever the reason, these photo montages are fun to assemble and even more enjoyable to share. With Keynote, one method of sharing these projects is by creating a DVD, and you can get this done using nothing but the software that comes standard with every modern Mac.
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The photo presentation I'm using as an example was played at our fifth graders' completion ceremony last year. It contained 155 slides and about 275 images (not counting built text on some slides). This is a big slideshow, but I'm going to try to give you a good idea on how to get from blank slides to a DVD you can share with family and friends.
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Organize in iPhoto

If you are going to be using several images in Keynote, it is a good idea to get them all organized in iPhoto first. This way, you can directly access the images from Keynote's Media Browser rather than having to constantly switch between your presentation and a folder of images. (This also works with the most recent version of Aperture.)



Before I import any images, I set up a folder named after the school I work at. After that, I create albums within that folder named after the different fifth grade teachers, events, or other related category. For example, last year some of my albums may have been titled "Shanks," "YMCA Camp," and "Other Teachers." By the time all photos are imported, I will usually have between 500 and 750 images catalogued, and, hopefully, every staff member and every fifth grade student will be accounted for.

Composite in Keynote

Next comes the fun step: putting it all together! Needless to say, not very picture is used, but Keynote gets a workout in this process nevertheless. For the sake of article length, I'm going to assume you have a basic understanding of how Keynote works and you know how to insert, adjust, and mask images from within the application. Here I'm going to focus on some tips to help you through this process and optimize your presentation for viewing on a standard television screen.

Watch Your Space. When your Keynote presentation gets viewed on a standard television, not every inch of the slide will be visible. Plan for the space that will be off-screen. Personally, I use an overlay from Keynote User that sets a red line around the TV-screen borders. You can go here to get it.


What you see versus what a TV will see.

Start Timing Early. When setting a presentation to auto-play, Keynote has limited options, but you can take control of those options with the Build Inspector. Use the "More Options" pane to fine tune your settings, and make sure every build is set to transition automatically so you can check timing with your music selection. Just launch the song in iTunes, and play your presentation. This will give a decent idea of how the music will fit with your visuals. If you have multiple songs, set up a Playlist ahead of time.

On this note, you might be wondering why I'm not recommending using the Document Inspector to set the audio before playing the presentation – excluding the need for iTunes (or other audio source). Simply, if you use the Document Inspector, two things may get in the way. First, it can be tricky using this method to select more than one song from iTunes. Second, the audio may become disjointed or choppy if the times for the slideshow and the music do not match.

Watch Your Transitions. Depending on how you choose to encode, some transitions may be problematic. Personally, I tend to avoid Burn, Drop, Push Up, and Push Down slide transitions. Drop and Fly-In builds may also cause problems, but using H.264 has reduced the issues I've had with these. (I use MPG-4 for the site, so I still avoid these by force of habit.)

Basically, if your plan your slideshow out from the beginning, knowing that a TV will be the final destination for sharing your work, you should be in good shape. Patience is key, though. The first couple of times I went through this process, I ran into several problems. The more I've done it, the smoother the process has become.

Export to iMovie

Once your document is complete, select Export from the File menu. When the sheet appears, make sure you have selected QuickTime. The default settings should be fine for importing into iMovie, but you may have to tweak slide and build durations to get a length that most closely matches your music. Unfortunately, this step can be quite time consuming unless you have a G5 or Core Duo equipped Mac.



Before you take the next step, view your file in QuickTime to make sure everything looks okay. Now is the time to find glitches – not when you are already in iMovie. This step can get frustrating at times, but it will be more frustrating if you find an error after you took the time to import this file into iMovie!

Next, open iMovie, and drag the QuickTime file into the timeline at the bottom of the window. If you are planning on adding various clips, you may want to drop it in the clips well instead.



Once in iMovie, I really only worry about two additions. First, I use the media pane to add my music to the timeline as well as the audio clips of interviews I conducted with the children. (This usually involves some volume tweaking as well.) Then I add chapter markers to the movie that will become selectable on the DVD. To add a chapter, you move the slider in the timeline to the point you want a chapter to begin and click "Add Marker" in the chapters pane.

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Once you are finished in iMovie, it's time to click "Share" in the menu bar and select "iDVD." iDVD will automatically launch, and your iMovie project will be imported.

iDVD: The Final Step

The last step is the easiest but the most time-consuming. In iDVD, use the themes pane to select a menu theme. (I'm using Reflection Black in this screenshot). Next, use the media pane to add images to the menu. Finally, click on the shutter next to the volume slider to burn your project to a DVD. Warning: This will take a while. Don't plan on baby-sitting the computer while this is going on. Furthermore, if you are making multiple copies, it takes less time to create subsequent copies than the first one.

Once iDVD ejects your disc, you are done. Pop the DVD into a standard player, sit back, and enjoy your masterpiece!

Technical Notes:

• In Keynote, if H.264 is giving you problems, try MPG-4 at 24 fps. This usually does the trick if I'm having problems exporting.
• In iMovie and iDVD, your project will look pixelated on the computer screen. This is normal because it is being converted into a standard TV resolution, which is much lower than your computer's resolution.
• I have never tested one of my projects on an HD-TV. I don't know how it will look on one of these, but I know they look fine on standard televisions.
• This process may not work with iMovie '08 and later.

Tags: software, how-to

Many of Keynote's default slide backgrounds are pretty good. In fact, I'm very fond of the background found in Apple's Storyboard theme (pictured). However, using that background on other objects can prove tricky.



What I wanted to do in revising a presentation was create a more random layout for my built text. Pictured below is the original slide followed by the outcome where I used a foreground object that uses the Storyboard background. This looks easier than it really was.

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In order to pull something like this off, you need to know a little bit about how Mac OS X stores certain application information. Many Mac OS X applications are "packages." Put simply, this means what you see as an application is actually a series of directories that makes the program work all bundled up together. If an application is a package, the command "Show Package Contents" will be available in the contextual menu if you right-click the icon.

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If you select to show contents, a new window will open with a set of vaguely named folders. (You may have to open a folder called "Contents" to see these depending on the application.) The information we are looking for is in the folder called "Resources." Don't mess with anything in this folder, you are just looking for another folder called "Themes."



Once you open this folder, you'll see a bunch of Keynote theme files with the extension ".kth." If you double-click on any of these themes, Keynote will open a new presentation using the theme you selected. That's not what you want to happen. Again, "Show Package Contents" comes to the rescue. Once you find a file called "theme_plain.tiff" (where theme is the name of the theme you are browsing), copy and paste that file to someplace you will remember. Do not move the image itself! Use copy and paste.

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Now that we have the backgrounds we want copied to another location, we can use them on objects in our presentation. First, create your object. Then, using the Inspector, set the object to "Image Fill." Then you can browse for the image you want, or you can drag it into the image well on the inspector. Choose "Scale to Fill" to make sure the image fills the entire object, and you're done.

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If you think you're going to use these backgrounds often, you should probably make a folder or an iPhoto album in which to store them all for easy access. You can also find image resources for charts and graphs this way, and this same trick got me the sticky note image seen in my second slide at the top of the post. (It came from opening up the Stickies Dashboard widget.) A final word of warning though – messing in the resource folders of application packages can really mess up the program if you move or delete anything. Remember, if you find something you want to use, copy it, and paste that copy to another location.

Update: I've discovered this method does not work for Keynote 1 themes. To extract a legacy theme's background, follow the steps above, but now you are looking for either "theme_bk.pdf" of "theme_cover.pdf." (Again, theme represents the name of the theme you are browsing.) I hope this helps some of my readers who got confused when opening up themes like Parchment!

Tags: software, how-to