Revisiting the idea of a Keynote Reader in time for Keynote 4 - hey Apple, why not use iTunes to help the Windows world see just how good Keynote really is?

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Revisiting the idea of a Keynote Reader in time for Keynote 4 - hey Apple, why not use iTunes to help the Windows world see just how good Keynote really is?

Date Created: 23 May, 2007, 12:54 AM

Tonight (May 22) iMug - Melbourne's Internet Macintosh user group held its monthly general members' meeting.

Adobe presented its new Adobe CS3 with a focus on Photoshop. While I'm not a big user of Photoshop, even I was wowed by what I saw, and judging by the gaping mouths of the professional users present , this is one helluv'an upgrade.

I led off the evening's proceedings with a short "What's new" segment while the Adobe rep. continued to install CS3 on a local member's Macbook (black, of course). From other members who had already done the install, it seemed not out of the ordinary to take more than 45 minutes to install.

I decided to devote this month's segment to a couple of new applications to help Mac users manage the proliferation of pdfs that likely adorn their desktops. As someone who regularly downloads academic papers from websites in pdf format, I know something had to be done about the "confetti" adorning my desktop.

Moreover, for Mac users, we know that since the beginning of OS X, Apple has licensed technologies from Adobe to print directly into pdf format, while our Windows brethren need to purchase - as per usual - additional software to perform the same function.

We even get lucky, for when you go to the Print menu, you get to see a cornucopia of choices:

Notice, above, the range of means by which to save a document, no matter which application you're in.

Personally, I now use the Mail PDF function to mail patients and clients where possible, invoices and homework sheets, as well as articles from the web of merit. None seem to mind, and most appreciate me thinking about minimising tree usage!

But if you look carefully at the drop-down menu, above, you might notice some differences between my menu and your own. That's because I've installed some demo versions of very interesting, and particularly Mac-like applications to help me reel in those wayward pdfs.

Let me put it this way: What iTunes is to mp3s, and iPhoto is to jpegs, these other apps (DocumentWallet; Yep; Papers; DevonThink) is to pdfs.

Believe it or not iTunes is so versatile, you can actually drop in pdfs and let Apple's free software help you create organisation from chaos, complete with tags and other metadata.

Here, for instance, is the first page of a pdf opened in Apple's free Preview, a great viewer which has Acrobat beat for speed and ease of use.

If I grab the file and drop it into the main library window of iTunes, this is what it looks like (click to enlarge):

iTunes tags it with an audiobook icon. Double-clicking the entry opens it in Preview. Meanwhile, you can use the same Get Info fields in iTunes to help you tag it with keywords to aid your retrieval of the document within iTunes search window or using Spotlight.

There is no doubt in my mind that iTunes, from its humble beginnings as Casady and Green's SoundJam, has developed into one of Apple's key and killer apps. Who knows what success the iPod might have achieved without its hand-in-glove synergy with iTunes.

I praised iTunes' dexterity some time back when I politely and gently took uber-blogger and unconferencer Dave Winer to task for his intemperate criticisms of iTunes after he had inadvertently wiped out his iPod's content when moving from one Mac to another. I entitled that blog entry, "Defending the iPod against those who berate its ease of use and interface" (December 24, 2005).

Winer called iTunes' interface one of the worst he had ever encountered, and I countered by firstly taking him step by step through iTunes' more obvious strengths, then challenging him to locate another app. on either the Windows, Mac or (by extension, Linux) platforms that could perform as many functions as iTunes, a Swiss Army Knife of an app, if ever there was one. In my blogged retort to Winer (and Paul Thurrott) I added up some nineteen functions iTunes could perform, and that was before movie downloads and AppleTV were released by Apple.

Winer, in his usual fashion, neither acknowledged nor replied to my tendering of Mac community-oriented guidance. Now, as irony would have it, having been given a Zune by Microsoft, Winer is about to learn just how advanced iTunes is over its principle rival. I wish him luck, because he is in for hours of frustration.

Returning to pdf storage, it may be too much to ask iTunes to also act as guardian and gatekeeper for one's pdfs, especially if there are well-developed Mac-like and inexpensive shareware solutions available.

Let me not go into detail, but if you are hoarding pdfs, and don't know how to sort them other than the old nested folders sorting routine a la System 6, then you owe it to yourself to explore the suggested apps. Each does it job somewhat differently, from the elegantly simple DocumentWallet which so much reminds me of Visioneer's Paperport software before Visioneer abandoned the Mac for richer pickings in the Windows world, to the more sophisticated Yep and DevonThink.

(As an aside, Paperport is now in version 11, retails for US$199, and ironically has a search function called Watson!)

As pdf creation and usage on the Mac increases with Leopard's imminent arrival, it's a wonder if Apple will provide its own app, like iTunes and iPhoto, or allow for the shareware developers to continue to enjoy their time in the sun. Apps like Yep, DevonThink and Papers are truly rich apps, very deep, which require considerable study to gain the most benefit from, even though each can easily do the most mundane storage and tagging tasks. It's when they reach out to the internet that your eyes will widen as to their abilities.

I want to return to the iTunes Swiss Army knife metaphor for a moment. It's clear that Apple have done much thinking and superior coding with iTunes. For a complex, multi-purpose app, it's almost crashproof.

We're entitled to now ask, "... is that all there is?" in true Peggy Lee fashion.

My answer - or query to the iTunes' development team - is to offer iTunes up as a response to a Keynote lament I blogged about some time back, in the days when those of us in the Keynote fraternity were fearful of it becoming abandonware, so few were its updates.

Despite Microsoft's ubiquitous presence in boardrooms and conventions with Powerpoint, not everyone has purchased MS Office. Unfortunately, rather than converting their Powerpoint stacks into pdfs, many users simply upload them to the web, so even more people have to endure their lousy animations, chintzy typographics and clip-art, and gaudy backgrounds groaning with bullet points. To continue the torture, Microsoft made available a Powerpoint reader stand-alone app for those eschewing an MS Office purchase.

My hope was that if Keynote was to ever gain a foothold, it too needed a cross-platform stand-alone Reader, one that preserved all the elegance of Keynote's transitions, graphics, and typography.

Alas, it never came, and those of use who wanted others to see our Keynotes in action needed to convert the files into Quicktime movies, blowing them up hugely in size. Great for distributing via CD or as embedded streaming movies on our webpages, but hardly useful for email distribution or webdownloads.

So, enter iTunes. If Keynote 4, as seen so far in a number of Steve Jobs' Keynotes such as WWDC 06 and Macworld 07, will be even more integrated with Leopard, perhaps needing some of Leopard's special herbs and spices, including Core Animation and Audio, then surely it deserves to become the new lingua franca of persuasive presentations. It will surely leave the bloated and confusing Powerpoint 12 in its wake.

Why not use iTunes as the de facto Keynote reader? Why not, like podcasting and Slideshare.net with its nutty "World's greatest presentation competition" (interesting winner, but I still don't get the point), have a section on iTunes devoted to letting the world see your Keynotes in all their glory, rather than the anorexic appearance Slideshare demanded by their conversion into pdfs?

Now, I have no idea of the coding required to do this, or whether it's possible. But it seems to me that an app. that can show movies, do podcasts, rip and burn CDs, download music and audiobooks, can be extended to show Keynote slides with all their qualities intact.

And thereby show those in the Windows world that indeed there is an alternative to Powerpoint, and one more reason to make the switch.

Over to you - am I hitting every branch of the cluetree on the way down, or does the world deserve to see and thus share more of Keynote and better presentations via iTunes?