Keynote

Received my free copy of Keynote on the way out of the keynote yesterday, with two hours before my presentation. Considered delivering my pres in Keynote rather than in PowerPoint. Installed it on the jschool TiBook I was carrying and imported my PowerPoint presentation. Import went great, and applied a theme that had the whole thing looking ten times better than PowerPoint at its finest (which, some would argue, is not saying much). Out of curiosity, checked the filesizes – the Keynote version was more than 10x larger than the PowerPoint original! This is because Keynote uses an XML data store, rather than binary blobs. That, in turn, means that any app can read and write the Keynote file format, which is fantastic for interoperability. But XML is not known for compactness (see my iTunes gripe).

Music: Sly & the Revolutionaries :: Acapulco Gold

2 Replies to “Keynote”

  1. I was especially intrigued by Steve’s near the end of the Keynote demo. He mentioned how their open XML format would allow you to, “generate Keynote presentations automatically.”

    Take a little data mining, mix in some stock images, run it through a XSLT engine and *poof* a piping-hot Keynote presentation is emailed to you every morning. Every CEO’s dream! ;)

    Methinks there is some potential here…

  2. Keynote could EASILY just compress the XML file with gzip or some open compression. While XML isn’t compact, it compresses fantastically (due to the repetition of tag keywords and other repeated symbols).

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