Keynote for the iPad is a decent companion program if you need to give light presentations or make light edits while on the road. As a sole means of creating presentations, I found it lacking.

The Art of the Transfer

Currently, getting files to and from your iPad is needlessly difficult. To get an already-created presentation from your computer to your iPad, you need to either sync it via iTunes, or send it to yourself via e-mail; there’s no mountable file-system or iDisk support. Also, if you make changes to the presentation, you’ll need to export and re-download it via iTunes; it will not auto-update your local copy. Also, you can only export in Keynote and PDF; you cannot export your slides as a PPT file.

I had decent luck with transferring Keynote and PowerPoint presentations. Only one (a Keynote presentation, oddly) had any sort of problems; the others came in just fine.

The problematic Keynote presentation I expected to have problems with. I use a lot of third-party fonts in my presentations, and since you are limited to what Apple provided, custom fonts will be substituted. Below is what the title page looks like in OS X Keynote and iPad Keynote.

Title Slide From iPad

Title Slide From OS X

Those weren’t the only issues I had. About 20 of my slides were charts, and the slides were designed to transition so the pie chart was the same size and in the same place on every side. To ensure this, when I created the presentation, I just duplicated the first slide with the chart and changed the numbers. When I gave the presentation on my MacBook, it worked perfectly. Unfortunately, on the iPad that was not the case and on some slides the chart size changed ruining the effect — the other common elements displayed correctly. The iPad’s resolution is 4:3 and I built the presentation for a 16:9 widescreen display.

I also had some odd issues with graphics. I tend to have a lot of full-frame images (where the image takes up the entire slide). On the presentation I had problems with, on some slides the graphic was pushed-up, requiring me to reposition them. Other presentations with full-frame graphics worked OK, so I might just have one Cursed Presentation.

Bottom line, the simpler the better when transferring presentations to the iPad. If you have a graphic-intensive talk, be prepared to spend some time double-checking it. In fact, if you’re going to be using your iPad to give a talk, you are going to want to take its limitations into account when you design it.

The Art of Giving

With the optional VGA cable you can hook your iPad up to a projector or a display. In my limited testing (comprised of hooking it up to an LCD display) it worked very well. The iPad seemed to auto-detect the resolution and the slides displayed as well as they did on the iPad screen. However, while the auto-detection looks OK, I did notice some distortion of pie charts on the display; they were stretched horizontally (this could be due to the conversion from widescreen to 4:3, and back to widescreen again.

The presentation tools when connected to an external source are limited. There is no presenters view or notes view. All you see is a black screen with a slide count. There is a pop-up display that will let you chose a starting point, but there’s no way to see what the next slide is. The Apple Remote also doesn’t work with it, so you’re pretty much chained to the podium and can’t move around. Could you see Steve Jobs being restricted to giving an iPad-presentation without free range of the stage?

The lack of a presenter’s view and notes is a deal-breaker for me. Unless you have an excellent memory, use note cards, or just read your slides aloud Keynote for the iPad is of limited value for giving presentations. Also, since the only way to see your slides is on the projector, you’re going to be spending more time facing the screen than your audience.

The Art of Making

Again, the simpler the presentation, the easier time you will have creating presentations. The good news is, Apple provided a decent set of templates that closely mimic the templates you get in the desktop version of Keynote. The bad news is, there’s no way for the iPad to recognize your corporate templates as real templates; the closest you can come is importing the template and copying it every time you want to create new talk.

One nice touch is when you use an Apple-supplied template and add a slide, you’ll get a pop-up of slide types to use that match your template — for example, a slide with bullet lists, or a slide with just a text box.

I found Keynote to have a steeper-learning curve than I’m used to for Apple — I needed to read the help to learn how to add a text box. I found myself going, “OK, how the heck do you do this?” frequently. Some tasks seemed needlessly complicated. There does not appear to be an easy way to customize a wedge color; I had to use the column with the color I wanted. Also, apparently no one at Apple is color blind, because I couldn’t view color names.

The Art of Closing

Is it possible to use your iPad to create and give presentations? Yes.

Is it possible to create and give amazing, TED-quality presentations on your iPad? Not, really.

If you’re willing to trade some features and inconveniences to save carrying around a laptop, you might get a lot of use. There was a point in my testing when I “got” the potential of this tool. I was scouring the halls at work trying to find a free conference room to test out the projector. I’ve done a version of this trip before, juggling a laptop, power cables, etc.. Now I just had a computer the size of a pad of paper. Future versions of Keynote, or a competing product that address the issues I encountered could turn the iPad into a killer presentation tool.

As it stands, Keynote for the iPad will let you give an adequate presentation. It will not let you give an amazing performance.

In a surprising move, Apple has signed on with a handful of other major mobile device manufacturers to end the madness of proprietary charging interfaces and agreed to one standard for all, according to Reuters. That’s in Europe, anyway, although there’s hope that the agreement could result in more cross-compatibility on this side of the Atlantic, too.

Along with Apple, five other cell phone manufacturers have agreed to the deal put forward by the European Commission, which is not binding and instead depends on voluntary cooperation from the private sector. The other five companies are Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Research In Motion, Motorola and Samsung, which means that Apple basically had to toe the line or risk looking like the villain in a field of heroes. Hopefully no one breaks rank, since that could result in the agreement becoming insubstantial.

The agreed-upon standard is micro-USB, which is already fairly ubiquitous, so it will be a huge bonus for consumers if this goes through as planned. I’ve got about four or five micro-USB cables lying around within eyeshot, in fact. Devices from companies that agree to the standard will have to ship with a charger that matches the specifications put forward by the commission, though eventually the two will be allowed to be sold separately. The time frame for implementation of the new standard is said to be within 3-4 years, and the hope is that by adopting a single charger, people will have less cause to throw out their old ones when they purchase a new phone.

For Apple, the agreement will lead to the inclusion of an adapter rather than the abandonment of the dock connector standard they’ve so consistently championed. An Apple spokesperson said in a statement following the deal’s announcement that it’ll ship future iPhones with a dock-connectable micro-USB adapter, which is completely in compliance with the specifics of the new agreement.

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The good thing about this slideshow program is that it looks very much like Keynote, and is very easy to use. Everything they have done with the design helps you feel like you are using a desktop application. I found myself going to the menu bar to change settings more than once. It also looks very much like Leopard.

Perhaps 280 slides’ best addition to the online offering is the ability to search and add video and images from popular websites like flickr, and YouTube.

I think it is a pretty good platform for slideshows, but then again, I don’t make slideshows that often. It is definitely better for me than Zoho and Google.

Give it a whirl (it is still in beta) and let us all know how it goes.

[via TechCrunch]

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