NVMUG eNews 9/15/2007
Last updated 9/18/2007
iWork '08 Keynote and Questions and Suggesions
iWork '08 Keynote Presentation from Apple Sales and questions, answers and suggestions.
1. iWork '08 Sales Keynote Presentation
During our August meeting, Neil Raphel asked how Keynote was different from PowerPoint. As our NVMUG Apple Ambassador, Hartley Jackson (that's me) was able to go online to Apple Sales in search of an answer. I found a Keynote presentation on iWorks intended for use in face-to-face sales. I brought it to this meeting because it presents a lot of good information about iWorks, Pages and Numbers as well as Keynote, and because it is a good example of what Keynote can do
A. Keynote
The person making a Keynote presentation sees a display like this.
The current slide is on the left, the next slide on the right, the time, and whatever you want to say is on the bottom. Your viewers see only the slide currently being displayed.
Mostly I read what was written for the Apple sales people on the bottom. Sometimes substituted my own comments.
Keynote '08 makes it possible for everyone to make cinema quality presentations. You can add animations to punctuate your messages, and add cinematic slide transitions. It is easy to remove the background image so you can use the image with your own photos. You can create sophisticated animations, and tell your stories with A to B motion.
This may be rather dull reading, but when you see them presented with Keynote they are exciting.
In Keynote you can deliver presentations even when you are not there. You can:
- record voiceover and mouse clicks with your presentation
- Playback your voice with recorded timing, and
- Export your presentation to QuickTime iTunes, iDVD, and YouTube.
This may answer Neil Raphel's question at the meeting about being able to put a Keynote presentation on the Internet using some other format.
Oh, by the way, when I wrote this in Pages, I added the first * line. Pages added the * before the other lines until I hit a double return to stop the list. How many other programs can make lists so easily?
There are now more than 35 Keynote presentation themes. Slide masters include image and text placeholders as you have in Pages. You can now add selected picture frames that automatically fit your image.
B. Pages
Pages '08 is both a streamlined word processing program and a powerful page layout program. Use the word processing mode to write everything from letters to books. The text flows from one page to the next. Use the page layout mode with images and text to design newsletters, flyers, and artistic brochures. The text flows between linked boxes.
With the new contextual format bar you can change the look of text, of images, and tables. It is now possible to track edits by multiple authors and editors. Most of the image tools work the same in Pages as in Keynote. There are many professional templates in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote that you can use.
In answer to a question. Pages can use your address book information. It is a surprise to open an envelope template and find that your return address is already there if you have entered it properly in you Address Book.
C. Numbers
Apple calls Numbers the spreadsheet for the rest of us.
Tables are powerful spreadsheets with over 150 numeric, financial, statistical, date and time, and logical functions available. You can add headers for columns and rows, and use the header names in formulas instead of less meaningful B2 to B42 coding. You can use footers for summary data (but only one footer to a table). Sort complete rows in a table, and all the columns are sorted together.
Instead of being tied to one big spreadsheet, you can have multiple tables on a sheet. You can change column widths or even move columns in one table without affecting the other tables.
Data in one table can be linked to data in another table so that changing one automatically changes the other. These links hold even when tables are moved around.
It easy to create live 2D and 3D charts that change when you change data in the reference table. You can add content using the iLife Media Browser. Numbers provides the same text boxes and tools that are available in Pages; including Instant Alpha (which is the name for making the background transparent). You can also add maps from Google.
Using the Interactive Print View you can fit your tables to different printable pages on one sheet or on multiple sheets. Interactive Print View provides a slider to scale tables, charts and graphics. You can even edit tables and charts and move them among the different pages without losing their linked values
You can make your own customizable templates with built in formulas and charts.
I have imported AppleWorks spreadsheets, and you can import and export between Numbers and Excel, but macros in Excel may not work in Pages and the beautiful stuff in Pages probably will not transfer to Excel.
I believe the demo probably sold iWork to at least one person who was debating whether to buy Keynote and another considering the new Pages. Ask to see this sales demo at your Apple Store, or just by iWork for $79.
2. Questions, Answers and Suggestions
We added three new library books. Learning Web Design, 3RD Edition by Jennifer Niederst Robbins from O'Reilly, The Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby from Peachpit Press, and Dynamic Learning Photoshop CS3 by Jennifer Smith from O'Reilly. Reviews of these book are now on our NVMUG Web site
I bought the new Learning Web Design, 3RD Edition. If you would like my previous Learning Web Design, Version 2, let me know by an email response to the eNewsletter. The first person who responds and makes arrangements to pick it up will get it. This offer will expire in approximately one week when it will otherwise go to recycling.
A light moment with Stephen Farber showing a CD to Warren Walker, Midge Lubot, and Russell Carlson.
Stephen Farber brought in an unregistered Version 2 of Parallels which can be used to upgrade. It requires an Intel Mac and copy of Windows XP 2000. He is cleaning out a garage full of no longer new Macintosh stuff. If you are interested in what he might have for sale of for free, please contact him directly at
stfarber@sover.net or 802 888-7055
This is an unauthorized suggestion.
Richard Smith, who provided the projector used in the meeting, said he took old Minolta 700 senior pictures for processing onto a Kodak CD. They came back as 1.5 megapixel JPEG images which look very jagged when enlarged. Members suggestions included sending the film to have them printed or buying a scanner.
Warren Walker suggested that a flatbed scanner with film processing from Epson could could produce excellent images and would cost less than $200.
We suggested that he consider buying a digital camera for the future. Warren said that a 2 meg camera with a good glass lens would produce better images than a 5 meg camera with a cheaper plastic lens. The consensus appeared to be that a 5 meg camera would be enough for 8 x 10 images or even larger. Warren suggested that he figure out what he wants to do, and then decide what features he wants and can afford.
Richard Smith said he would like a camera that compensates for camera shake. Those are more expensive.
A tripod is the least expensive, and possibly the best, solution. Warren said that he used a walking stick to steady his camera for years.
Film speed and grain size are related. The censor resolution (number of pixels) and speed of the camera are not related. You cannot change the image sensor in your camera like used to put in a faster film. If you need the equivalent of a faster film, you use a higher ISO setting on a digital camera. When you increase the ISO on a camera which has a great many pixels crowded onto a small sensor, you get noisier, oddly colored, pictures. You can use a higher ISO setting with less noise if your camera has a larger sensor, such found in digital SLR cameras.
Warren Walker showing some of his large prints to Russell Carlson. Midge's company mounted the images.
Richard said that when he imported his JPEG image into iPhoto from the DVD the resulting image was smaller with reduced quality. Warren explained that each time a JPEG image is processed, the size and quality is reduced. This does not happen when you simply drag an image from one file to another. Would dragging an image into iPhoto rather than importing it result in a higher quality?
TIFF images hold their quality when processes, but their files are much larger than JPEG files.
Warren said that professional photographers use camera RAW or JPEG because a high quality JPEG is so good and the file is so much smaller. (You might want to use TIFF if you use Photoshop if want to preserve the layers you used so that you can modify them later and want to be able to share the images with people who do not own Photoshop.)
A woman who is working on PCs came to the meeting for help in moving data from her older iBook. She could not remember her old password among other problems. She came to the meeting to find if there was someone she could hire to help her. Stephen Farber made an appointment to provide the help.
Neil bought a 500 gig Iomega hard drive and found that it would not accept his movies because it would not accept anything larger than 4 gigs. Apparently the new drive was formated for PCs. Neil had to reformat the hard drive to get it to work. Warren said he recommends that you always use Disk Utility to reformat new hard drives. He said it is important to check for bad sectors.
Raid hard drives transfer files twice as fast if you write half to one drive and half to another. Someone said they use mirrored pairs of stripe raid drives so four drives write in parallel to create a file on two drives and a back up on tow other drives.
Richard Smith said they use three drives with special software to capture everything twice so any two drives have all the information. If one drive fails, they put in a fourth drive and it automatically moves data from the bad drive to the fourth drive.
Bruce Shields said that his town uses Keystroke Capture to capture everything to a drive which is probably in a vault.
Richard reported that someone came to him with a problem. Over three weeks of data had been lost, and the person was about to restore the data that was three weeks old. Fortunately, FileMaker has its own recovery system, and Neil was able to restore it.
Russell Carlson said he had a dozen different sign-ins for Firefox and would like to get rid of some of them. Stephen suggested that he try to find the sign-ons in Keychain, find one that he is not worried about, and see if there is a delete option.
Russell also had questions about opening multiple windows in Firefox. Warren provided answers with the help of Midge and her laptop. Try Command-N or File > Open to open more than one window at a time, or use Command - T to open a new tab. Be careful if you close a window because you may not want to shut down all your tabs.
You can use iTunes to get radio over the internet, or you can get the URL. Radio is also available over Podcasts. There is a program, Audio Hijack, which can save streaming audio from a Web site.
Midge sends out a weekly update for New England Kiwanis districts. The updates are about 50 pages. Each week she adds new information and drops off old information. She writes them in Pages. Her problem is that they are too big to email, and she wanted to know how to find out how big an email is. How do you determine the message size before you send it?
She also said that a file that was 60 mb in Pages might be 300 in email. One possibility discussed is that Rich Text format is encoded in HTML for email which could make it much larger. Plain text does not have to be converted to HTML to email.
I ran some experiments and found that you can email a message to yourself, and listing in Mail shows the size. An over 2000 word plain text eNewsletter with no images was 13.8 KB.
In Photoshop you can reduce the quality drastically without affecting the appearance of the display of a small image. I had copied the Keynote display from my screen and dragged it into Pages. When I dragged it from Pages to my screen it was about 800 KB. Converting it to a JPEG image and lowering the quality in Photoshop reduced it to 8 KB. Pasting in the three 8 KB increased the email size to 39.8 KB.
The same eNewsletter with no images and small part of the text changed to bold and some of the bold text sizes changed was 50.1 KB. I assume that the more that is specially formatted and the more format changes that are made, the more HTML code that will be required and the larger the document size will be.
When the three images were dragged into this formatted email it grew to 75.7 KB.
Learning Web Design says there is no way to accurately predict download times, and then sites the general rule that estimates one second per KB for a 28.8 Kbps download. Today, connections at this slow speed are rare except in places like the North East Kingdom of Vermont.
