| Just what is it about Keynote that is changing the way people present? For the better! | | Date Created: 23 Apr, 2006, 04:28 AM |
 I've been planning on writing quite a treatise about Keynote but a few events told me I'd better throw some preliminary ideas together for a blog entry.
The essence of this entry is the independent observations of several Keynote users, including myself, that the application has an ineffable quality about it that brings out the creativity in its users.
Firstly, from a 2005 webpage looking at how to include quite complex mathematical equations in Keynote comes from Japan via Taku Yamanaka.
He commences his webpage entry on specialist mathematical equations representations this way:
"I am one of the very last people who switched from transparencies to computer presentations. I always preferred hand writing, because it was faster, and plots were clearer. I tried PowerPoint twice, but I did not like it at all. However, after trying Keynote, I finally found what I wanted, and decided to switch."
He then lists his reasons (referring to the superceded Keynote 2):
"• Imported PDF images are razor sharp, even after scaling. Compare plots on Keynote and PowerPoint. Clipping plots from EPS, PS, and PDF files is extremely easy with Tiger (OS X 10.4) or Panther (OS X 10.3)'s Preview, or TeXShop Previewer.
• It is simple, intuitive, and stress-free.
• With alignment guides, you do not have to spend time to align things.
• You can rotate graphics easily.
• You can move multiple slides together, and group slides by indenting them.
• You can easily write tables with merged cells or divided cells.
• After all, you can concentrate more on what to show and say, instead of trying to figure out how to make slides look better, and save time for preparation.
• If you have a PowerBook, you can view memo on your computer while the audience sees slides.
• Keynote 2 (that is a part of iWorks'05) has become even better! Its presenter's view shows the current slide, the next slide (or the action after a click), a timer, and notes. You can find the slide you want on your PowerBook either by typing a slide number, or pressing + or - keys, and then hit RETURN to show the slide. You do not have to whip through slides or dump all the slides in front of the audience. Let them see what they only need to see.
But most telling is his concluding paragraph:
"For some reason, when I use Keynote, I think that I should write less, and talk to the audience, instead of reading the slides. I still don't know why Keynote makes me feel that way."
Keep this thought in mind as we move on to other Keynote users' ideas. By the way, the writer speaks of Feynman equations and diagrams which look at the actions of electrons and other very small particles.
Now let's move to Keynote aficionado, current theme producer and former Keynote beta tester, Brian Peat who also owns a Keynote discussion list I subscribe to.
Reviewing Keynote 3 on the Macsimumnews site a few days after its much anticipated release at this year's Macworld, he writes:
"While many of you were oohing and ahhhhing over Steve Jobs’ demos of iLife during the Keynote address, I was typing madly into my live blog and waiting for ONE thing. And waiting, and waiting … and, finally, at nearly the one-hour mark, he got to it. Keynote 3! "
And here is Brian expressing the same idea as Taku's:
"Ever since I watched Steve showing off Keynote 1 four years ago, I’ve been enamored with the product. Something about it inspires me to create things. That’s the key to this great app, it just seems inspiring. All PowerPoint ever inspired me to do was yell at it." (Boldness added).
One of his many commentators on the page entry named "Dreyfus" offered his own take:
"... since I dropped (Powerpoint) and use Keynote exclusively, my colleague consultants (I work for an internation consulting group) cannot even believe what I am doing. So, I support your point: Keynote does inspire, it really does!
Cheers,
Dreyfus"
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 Ok, let's go hunting for more opinions and comparisons.
From Sun Microsystems employee and web identity, Tim Bray, comes a blog entry when Keynote was still in version 1 (12/2005). He is particularly scathing about the centrepiece of Powerpoint - Bullet points:
"I Suck · I have been a speechmaker for years, and I’ve used PowerPoint for years, and I’ve had lots of bulleted lists in those PowerPoints. But I’ve decided that (Edward) Tufte is right, and that bulleted lists generally suck, and I’m really trying not to do that any more.
I had a good excuse to make the break recently when I switched from PowerPoint to Apple’s excellent Keynote. Which is not to say that you can’t produce tedious, irritating, bullet-point-hell slides with Keynote, you can."
Correctly, he points out that if you simply and unthinkingly try to turn Keynote into a Powerpoint-wannabe, you'll end up with crappy presentations very easily. But the point of this blog entry is that there's something about Keynote that stalls that transfer of training; that cries out to you,
"Don't! There's a better way... you CAN present differently."
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 And now to one of my favourite switchers who saw the difference quite some time back and had the wherewithall to blog about it, Michael Hyatt.
In his Working Smart blog entry of June 29, 2004, he blogged this:
"I don’t know about you, but our business runs on PowerPoint. Last Friday, I led a seminar in Atlanta on publishing strategy with a group of 55 foreign publishers. Today, I made a presentation in Boston to some investors attending a “small cap” investor conference. I couldn’t do either without PowerPoint. Or, if I could, it would be much more difficult and much less interesting."
He then goes on to offer a long list of links for various Powerpoint resources and websites. Now this is eighteen months after Keynote was released in January 2003, and it hasn't made a blip on Michael's radar yet. He is a true believer in Powerpoint and its centrality to his business.
Six months later, in another blog entry entitled Mac Envy, he informs us of a revelation:
"... there’s no way I can even consider switching. For starters, I have too big of an investment in PC software. But I could tell my defenses were breaking down. Nevertheless, I honestly didn’t think about it again. Until today.
This morning after church, I went to a Board Meeting for a new startup company called The Orthodox Project. Joel Smith, my good friend and the entrepreneur who started the company, made a presentation on a Mac, using a package from Apple called Keynote. Oh my gosh! Have you seen this?
I am not easily impressed, especially by anything that resembles PowerPoint. Even though I use the software extensively, I sometimes wonder if we would be better off if PowerPoint was banned from corporate meetings. The bullets and transitions are so predictable.
They often end up as a substitute for genuine thinking. Like someone said to me in a meeting last week, “Start-up a PowerPoint presentation and the average IQ of the room drops by 10 points.” I’m afraid he might be right.
But Keynote is different. First starters, the slides are beautiful. The rendering of the type is extraordinary, like a high-quality printed piece. (I since learned that this is a function of Mac OS X.) The transitions were especially cool, graceful, and seamless. The closest thing I have seen to this is PowerPlug Transitions, but it has always seemed a little too self-conscious, like too much cologne or a drum track that is too loud.
Keynote’s transitions on the other hand are elegant and understated."
And after offering a few illustrations of Keynote in action, he concludes:
"This is the first software that has made me seriously consider buying a Mac for myself. No, I’m not ready to switch computers. I do have too big an investment—both in software and know-how—to consider switching. But I just might be able to justify buying a Mac for presentations. In my job, I make lots of them, so it might just be worth it. As you can tell, the process of rationalizing the purchase has already begun."
Indeed.
And so, in March 2006, we find Michael's transformation, based on his initial impressions of Keynote, is complete:
"I have to admit: I'm a certified Mac zealot. I’ve drunk the Kool Aid and nearly shaved my head. I even attended MacWorld this year to pay homage to “The Steve.” I witnessed first-hand his unveiling of the new MacBook Pro (hereafter “MBP”). I oohed and ahed with the thousands of other Mac faithful as he demonstrated the impressive new features and radically improved speed.
I was hooked. I walked out of the Moscone Center and immediately ordered one. Then I waited with anticipation for my new MBP to arrive. I finally received it on Friday, March 10, a few weeks later than Steve had promised in his keynote speech. Oh well, I thought, Apple still delivers products faster than its competitors."
That's not a bad, publicly-recorded effort of conversion in my book. I wonder how many other people have been tipped over to consider doing the same based on Michael's blog and personal recommendation. Apple seems to bring out these qualities in its users, doesn't it (now takes tongue from cheek)?
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 Moving on: someone I have blogged about earlier is Khoi Vinh, now the online design director with the New York Times.
In August 2004, he blogged about Keynote 1, with a principle lament that it had been a long time waiting to be upgraded to version 2 (it happened in January 2005), and he was fearful it was to be orphaned. Lucky for us he was wrong!
But what did this professional graphic designer say? He starts off quite positive about Powerpoint:
"It’s easy to see that PowerPoint wins out if you go by sheer number of features; it’s true that a Microsoft product will never be caught behind the count in features and that is, arguably, one of the reasons so much of their software seems bloated. But in this case, I’ll say what’s no secret: PowerPoint easily has the better feature set for professional presenters."
Further on a theme emerges:
"... where Keynote excels is user interface elegance and sheer aesthetics. In spite of its feature handicap, I prefer Keynote still because its method of managing and allowing users to understand templates, “Master Slides,” is straightforward and easily navigable. Even in the Windows version of PowerPoint, which is superior to and easier to use than its Macintosh counterpart, managing these templates requires a patient willingness to follow Microsoft’s oblique logic. This is a huge deal to me, because, at the very least, Keynote gets out of my way."
Bingo! "It gets out of my way"... a clue that many Keynote user would agree with, although for many Powerpoint users on the Windows side of life, that expression is likely to be meaningless.
And he concludes in a penultimate paragraph about Keynote's positive qualities:
"Keynote presentations are, by lengths, disproportionately more beautiful than anything you can generate from PowerPoint. Graphics look better and typography is actually treated with respect."
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And now some rather random, disconnected and rambling quotes I located via Google.
1. From an ArsTechnica thread arguing Powerpoint vs Keynote 2, "dhaveconfig" offers:
"We have a site licence for Office. Everyone has to have it, so everyone gets PowerPoint.
Still, the managers here who do presentations are all extolling the virtues of Keynote regularly, and we've got a pool of licences that users can request from.
Something is making them switch, and it's definitely not zealotry in these cases. These people don't care about their computer other than it working."
2. Further down in the same thread, Nadenf, offers the following facetious comment:
"Reasons people pick Keynote over Powerpoint:
1) Cube effect
2) Finer dissolve transition effect
3) Better looking built in templates
4) Transparency much higher quality
5) Text animations are higher quality
6) People want to impress people
7) People have egos
8) People want to impress people
9) People have egos"
After this the argument deteriorates into the usual Mac vs PC flame war I've found too tedious to engage in, preferring to argue the merits of individual software and its professional uses. |
 The ArsTechnica crowd remind me of a dog with a bone - they just won't let go, so it's quite amusing to watch the to-ing and fro-ing between the Powerpoint/MS protagonists and the Keynote/Apple crowd, with there being a goodly number of dual-users pointing out "it's the presenter, not the tool".
Mind you, there are some very talented and expert people occupying the forums so look past the flames for the gems of information.
In the same "Battlefront" forum in a more recent thread, (December 2005, prior to Keynote 3's release) named Presentations: Keynote vs Powerpoint, now that the dust has settled, we find a number of interesting parries and thrusts.
From Ian Wood: "If you are doing media-heavy presentations (I'm a panoramic photographer), then Keynote wins hands-down. For business presentations there's probably not so much in it, but as always GIGO applies - there are all too many people out there using presentation tools as an excuse to not actually give a presentation".
Followed up by "mkg": I do LOTS of presentations. My target audience is usually people who are very concerned with not only what's being presented, but how it's presented. The "how" portion of this involves both the presenter's ability to seamlessly integrate what he/she has to say with the visual cues, as well as the visual cues themselves - how they look, how they flow.
Since Keynote 2 came out, we've gone from 100% PowerPoint on Windows to approximately 65% PowerPoint on Windows, 35% Keynote. In my environment, people who use Keynote 2 out of the box prefer it to PowerPoint 2003 or PowerPoint 2004. Once they get used to putting a few slide masters together and a few transitions, they no longer consider going back. Hence the change in numbers I mentioned above."
... and this from "GiantRobot":
"I've done a lot of presentations in PowerPoint and Keynote. I'm not the world's greatest speaker but I've got enough experience to keep my various audiences from falling asleep. To me Keynote's layout is far more intuitive and does a better job of showing me what my audience will see. Keynote's default minimalist view (layout pane and an inspector window) gives you a pretty good idea of how your presentation will look to people looking at it. PowerPoint's default (button bars everywhere and collapsable bullet inspector pane) clutters up the main screen. For me this causes a disconnect between me and my perspective audience and I don't do as good of a job laying out slides.
My presentation style is very quick and I use slides behind my (sic) simply to illustrate a point. I find that Keynote doesn't get in my way when I build these sorts of presentations. To me Keynote keeps me thinking about how my presentation looks to an audience. The window isn't cluttered with buttons bars and the standard slew of Office widgets that causes me to disconnect from the feel of the presentation. Everything important I find tucked inside of the inspector window. I also find that Keynote keeps me looking at the slide rather than covering it up with dialog boxes. This reminds me of what I'm subjecting my audience to." (Bold emphasis added)
So now we are starting to get to the crux of the matter. We are hearing about better graphics, less tired themes, eye-catching text layout, smoother video, and other visual elements. But we are also hearing about workflow issues, and Keynote's "ability" to link the presenter to his or her presentation messages without interruption.
The ineffable begins to make way for more explicit understanding. |
 An oasis of straight forward thinking about presentations is available in a recent post on the Savage Minds blog.
This is a blog "devoted to both bringing anthropology to a wider audience as well as providing an online forum for discussing the latest developments in the field. We are a group of Ph.D. students and professors teaching and studying anthropology and are excited to share it with you."
Entitled Technology in the Classroom: PowerPoint Alternatives, the blog entry by Michael Wesch offers the following before suggesting via example how to use Dreamweaver to create an active presentation:
Powerpoint:
creates a format that
• encourages a hierarchy of bulleted notes
• is in a specific predetermined sequential order
• cannot respond to student inquiries
helps the presenter remember their notes
• while often doing great harm to the presentation
encourages students to
• remember key points
• let the professor decide which points should be “key”
• give the correct “answer” as decided by the professor
engourages the use of ridiculous icons that distract the audience
is trapped in linear “slideshow” mode, under-utilizing the possibilities of digital presentation |
The reader is invited to take a peek at some of the resultant comments which follows Michael's entry.
The following comment from Tim is one of the most informative and incisive I have seen in my presentation enlightenment travels. I can only do it justice by quoting it in whole (remember this is a blog about anthropology and its teaching:
"Powerpoint is old technology. It was whipped up by engineers who wanted to communicate with marketers, taking advantage of mid-late 1990s projector technology to do away with the old tripartite lecture material system of slide carousel, overhead transparencies, and notes.
Powerpoint concatenates all 3 of these into one. But it was designed with the linear and non-interactive ‘lecturing’ style of presentation practice in mind. As a simple way of projecting text and images it works tolerably well – although as I have said the templates and other formatting problems, encourage bad design (by which I mean the ability to communicate visually in an elegant way).
You also get just as many bad presenters making bad presentations with Powerpoint as you used to get with slides and overheads. People read out their slides, just like some people read out their lecture notes. I have seen some of the best anthropological minds give some of the most appalling lectures.
Sidney Mintz gave a fascinating social history of Coke but nearly put me to sleep (he put his head down and read a paper). I attended a workshop with Greg Dening on ‘Performance’ in which he gave the dullest, lacklustre speech about the importance of considering alternative modes of academic delivery (his own ‘performance’ was, again, to read out notes). Marylin Strathern appears to tie herself in verbal knots, while conveying incredible ideas. These guys are not good presenters, but they are great teachers – probably because lecturing is a small component of their teaching.
As many of the comments here have noted, the linear non-interactive style of Lecture presentations is not necessarily the best way to teach and learn. And if you want to challenge that mode then Powerpoint is not your tool. Like the famous names I have named, I think it is unlikely that many of us use Powerpoint and Lecturing as our sole teachng mode – my first year students attend small group tutorials, watch videos, participate in online discussions (their participation in these is graded), and other activities."
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Over on the ArchaeoAstronomy blog, Alun Salt of the University of Leicester's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, comments on Wesch's blog with his own perceptive entry:
"I thought I was scooped when I saw a Savage Minds post about Technology in the Classroom: PowerPoint Alternatives. Lots of thoughtful comments in the post too. Fortunately my forthcoming paper, if it forthcomes will be slightly different take on PowerPoint. In brief my conclusion is that PowerPoint doesn’t automatically create bad presentations, but it makes creating bad presentations so much easier."
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 Frasier Speirs , developer of FlickrExport, has a blog, and he too offers a rather humorous then insightful set of observations in this January 2005 excerpt:
"12:13 am - Giving Presentations
It should be a prerequisite for anyone whose job involves public speaking to be strapped to a chair and forced to watch at least fifteen straight hours of Steve Jobs keynotes.
Apart from coming out the other side saying "boom" all the time and mispronouncing "Jagwyre", the recipient of such training would hopefully understand the effectiveness of utter minimalism in designing a PowerPoint presentation.
I was chatting to atl about what would constitute a "Top 10 Tips for Speakers" and it went like:
1. Use Keynote
2. Use Keynote
3. Use Keynote
4. Use Keynote
5. Use Keynote
6. Use Keynote
7. Use Keynote
8. Use Keynote
9. Use Keynote
10. Use Keynote
11. Use Keynote
Ahem. But, seriously, folks. I have seen more PowerPoint presentations than I can shake a Dell laptop at, and here are some suggestions:
1. Get the relationship between your laptop and projector tested and sorted well in advance
I was at a technical conference once where, at the conference banquet, the convenor of the following year's conference got up to give a big trailer to persuade everyone to turn up the next year in Ottawa. On connecting the projector and opening the machine, his Windows NT laptop threw up a Blue Screen of Death.
The entire conference sat through an agonising twenty minutes of ad-lib promotion whilst someone did some troubleshooting. That was just awful. Don't let it happen to you.
2. Use Keynote
All joking aside, using Keynote is probably the best thing you can do to make your presentation stand out. It's to be expected that most people at your conference/meeting/whatever will be using PowerPoint. Even if you have to use a corporate template, the quality of Keynote's text, transitions and builds will set your presentation apart.
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 David Weinberger, an A-list blogger if ever there was one, has the JOHO blog here.
That link will take you to his blog entry of mid-November 2005 where he has decided to take the plunge and purchase a Powerbook.
Weinberger makes a call out to his many readers for assistance at making the switch, especially what software he will need, with the proviso he makes much of his living doing presentations, and so must use Powerpoint. Here are his exact words:
"Powerpoint. I make a good proportion of my living giving speeches and I use just about all of Powerpoint's animation capabilities. Open Office doesn't quite match it yet. And seamless integration with Powerpoint on my desktop would make life simpler. Hence, I think the answer is: Powerpoint."
Numerous correspondents take him to task for insisting on using Powerpoint but accept that in his domain this is what he demands. But one commenter offers the following:
You said you use PowerPoints animations pretty heavily. If you get Apple's keynote software you will be blown away by how much more professional and clean it is compared to Powerpoint.
I use Keynote every week. Besides the animations being far superior to PP I find it much more simpler and faster to use. Everything is centered around drag and drop (like most Mac apps)
Keynote can read PP files and export to a PP file.
It comes packaged (titled iWork) with Apple's word processor Pages for only like $80 bucks. Pages will also open and export Word documents.
To me iWork is a steal compared to purchasing Office.
Trust me you'll love it!" (Chris P) |
 If you're still with me I'm saving the best until last.
Do you know who Douglas Bowman is?
He is a master web site designer, who now runs his own design bureau, worked at Wired magazine designing its Wired News site, and is considered by many to be someone whose presentations you must see.
He visited my country late last year (Sydney) for Web Essentials 05, whose presentations have been podcast and are available on iTunes and elsewhere.
Bowman challenged the audience about the changes he sees coming for the web in a presentation he titled, Zooming out - from the trenches.
You can listen to his presentation here(11MB), and download his slide created in Keynote, but saved as pdf file here (33MB). Do remember when you see the slides that you are not seeing any transitions or builds (but I can guess some) and so you're seeing static images, albeit gorgeous. And do remember Keynote 3 was yet to be released.
If you've seen my Keynote slides, and certainly Garr Reynolds over on PresentationZen, the style and purpose will appear familiar.
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Andy Clarke, another web guru, host of blog All that Malarkey, and an audience member describes sitting through one of Bowman's slide shows thus:
"With Molly (Holzschlag) and I (sic) in session for Carson Workshops in only a few weeks and our presentation materials near completion, I have become interested in what audiences need or expect from presentation slides.
At this year's @media, I fell head-over-heels in love with Doug Bowman('s presentation slides). Not being a regular conference attender in the past, Doug's @media presentations visuals were truly inspiring and whilst I and almost all of the other presenters had created their presentation materials using Eric Meyer's remarkable s5 (Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System), Doug chose to use Apple's Keynote to power his presentations.
Despite being widely compared to Microsoft's Powerpoint, Apple's Keynote, used in the hands of someone with Doug's creative talents, can produce a rich visual experience which far surpasses anything I have seen from Powerpoint. Doug encouraged me to explore Keynote and in both my presentations for WOW in Cupertino earlier this year and the up-and-coming Carson Workshops, Keynote will be my choice of presentation tool.
Keynote is not without its faults or frustrations when building presentations, but its rich visual output is perfectly suited to the highly graphical material which I present.
After my WOW sessions, many in the audience requested copies of my presentations' slides. But despite Keynote's extensive range of output options, (Quicktime, PDF, Powerpoint, static images or Flash), it lacks the ability to export as HTML or XHTML and when exported, each of the four presentations PDF's averaged an enormous 25Mb. And while I have not yet run any tests for the accessibility of the exported PDFs, I have a pretty good idea that they will not live up the high standards set by Joe or Derek.
.... But this makes me question what audiences are looking for in presentation slides at workshops or conferences? My own slides are not verbatim of the words I speak and I imagine make little sense out of context. Our Carson Workshop sessions also make heavy use of transitions and animations to demonstrate the possibilities of CSS, none of which can be transferred successfully to static PDFs.
.... So now wonder I what is most important to audiences, the visual and aural experience during the presentation or the after show materials? And what about accessibility of the downloadable materials? Should presenters make an extra effort to ensure that their materials are as accessible as the work we produce in our day jobs?"
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Clarke is an advertising and web guru and is blown away by Bowman's slides, which are so far from the usual Powerpoint fare it's not funny. This is a guy with an aesthetic eye and love of graphics who until Bowman seems to have accepted the standard Powerpoint text and bullets as the way to present.
Conclusions:
Phew! It's been a bit of a labour chasing down these rather famous people in their own right from diverse fields to see how they have embraced Keynote and another way of presenting.
For me it means:
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 "Yes, there is a huge market for people wishing to learn another way of presenting, and using Keynote to do it."
The book cover (left) of one of the most popular Australian guides to Powerpoint best sums up the marketplace, doesn't it?
I don't think I'm any closer to telling you how Keynote elicits greater creativity and individuality. But it does. I'll keep up the chase for the ineffable but no doubt someone with a greater gift with words and ideas will offer up something more than I have. And of course we can always just watch and wait in wonder for the next Steve Jobs presentation with Keynote to gain some further insights, directions and models.
But now let me turn it over to you. You've got a comments section down below to enter into a discussion with me and other readers. Your comments, ideas and opinions are invited. |
 UPDATE - May 8, 2006: While checking out my referrals for this blog, I located a presentation blog I hadn't seen on all my travels, including Google searches: Indezine.
It has a link to the May edition of Inc. featuring an article by Ellen Neuborne entitled, "Making your (Power) Point."
In it, the author looks at a number of presentation tools for Powerpoint. Here is her opening paragraph, which lamentably features the same complaints you'll see over the web about Powerpoint.
"The only thing worse than sitting through a boring PowerPoint presentation is delivering one. Yet death by PowerPoint may be one of the biggest risks of doing business. On any given day, some 30 million PowerPoint presentations are delivered, according to Microsoft. Of course, when it was released for Windows in 1990, the software was an exciting new way of presenting information. But that's not always the case today. Among the most common offenses: Speakers simply read the slides to the audience; the text is too small; the color and animation are dull; the charts are too complex. Technology got us into this mess; now, technology is working hard to get us out. There are scores of new products designed to enhance, or even replace, PowerPoint. Some cost thousands, others are free. Here are six offerings that can help make your next presentation less of a snooze and more of a blockbuster."
From there, she offers an interesting selection of tidbits I suggest you go and read. But this entry about Keynote drew my attention:
"Best For… Groovy graphics
Keynote 3
Cool Features: In the unending battle between Macintosh and PC users, Keynote wields one of Apple's most potent weapons--super-rich visuals. Designed by and for Mac users, Keynote presenters incorporate 3-D images, a wide variety of shapes and textures, plus sharp photography and animation.
In Action: Richard Warner, CEO of What's Up Interactive, was just starting his presentation to the Technology Association of Georgia last year when through his earpiece he could hear the chatter of the venue's audio-visual squad. "As I was beginning my presentation, one of them said: 'Damn, what is that? It's beautiful.' Another responded: 'I'm sure it's Keynote.' 'Can we get that?' 'No, it's just for Macs.' " Audience members seemed equally impressed. Three of them are now his clients."
Getting this sort of write-up in Inc. up against some very expensive Powerpoint add-ons is the sort of thing Apple needs to attend to and include in its homepages. Since it doesn't I'll continue it here. |
UPDATE - November 17, 2006: I have continued to add to the blog's content a number of entries exploring the keynote vs powerpoint debate, based on feedback and my own giving of presentation skills workshops.
This week, inspired by a piece by Carl Howe on the Blackfriar's blog where he links to this article, I completed a haf-finished article about the topic. It's long but if you've come this far, you might as well keep going. It's entitled:
"Powerpoint, Obedience and Conformity: Why do smart people feel compelled to use Powerpoint when it’s no longer "best practice"? If it ever was..."
and you can locate it here. |
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