GreerMUG February 2007 Meeting Highlights

Opening Moments

Mike opened with his usual unusual drivel of topics and somehow included squirrels, Rolls Royce's, and explosions and apple juice. Should we be concerned about Mike?

MemberDock

Matt gave us a quick tour of the GreerMUG website which now includes all the back issues of our newsletter, The MUGInspector. Because Tim showed us last month how to use .Mac to publish a calendar, Matt has added a GreerMUG calendar to the website. The Member Perks section includes discounts from different vendors. Check that out. (Matt moves to the actual MemberDock.) Matt showed us a survey form that we're taking. GreerMUG wants to know if we should take off the summer months or have regular meetings. And we have another survey to see if there are any folks who are interested in a beginner's class for Macs. Our recycling efforts continue - we've raised $63 to date.

Core Presentation

Tonight's core presentation was a demo of Keynote by Matt-with-no-e.

Matt begins with a disclaimer: Matt thought he knew a good bit about Keynote, but he now realizes there's so much more. He has only begun to tap into its awesome power. Matt also disclaims that he is only using version 2 of Keynote from iWork 05. Matt was hoping that iWork 07 would have been out in time for this demonstration. Just think, whatever we see tonight is from old Keynote, today, it is even more powerrful.

To begin, Matt pulls up the export menu and zooms in on it. Wow, lots of options here. We can do a lot in Keynote and then port it over to other applications.

Now Matt brings up our GreerMUG pre-game show. It's done entirely in Keynote. How about that? When you start Keynote it gives you a menu of themes to choose from. The theme contains different master slides for different purposes - like a title slide, photo slide, list of bullets slide, etc. Neat. There are also different views so you can see your presentation different ways. Outline view, navigation view. Matt shows us outline view. Slides are created as you type. The tab key indents the outline and creates a bullet point on the slide. Shift-tab out-dents.

What if I've already got an outline I've typed in some other program? Well, if I save it as a text file (rich-text, too) I can copy and paste it into outline view and poof! Keynote creates my presentation. Whoaa!!

Okay, so now you've got your content into Keynote. Matt wants to show us some design aspects now. First, Matt shows us how to change a slide - he changes one to a photo slide. Of course, Keynote plays well with other Mac apps. The media browser (part of the Inspector) can show you all your photos in iPhoto, cool, just drag it in. Matt shows us how the Inspector lets you do things like rotating images. The Inspector lets you format and design very quickly.

Matt talks about themes. Sure Keynote starts you off with a good batch, but did you know that you can surf the net and download themes from 3rd party providers? Matt takes us to Keynote Themepark ! - They've done some very cool theme's with neat transitions. Some are for purchase, some are for free. Lots of detail. Good resource.

Then there's keynoteuser.com. They have themes, too. Plus tips, tutorials, user forum stuff. etc.

Now Matt goes back to Keynote. Matt gives us a text example. Again, the Inspector helps us format and design our text and text layout.

The Insert menu also gives you a pathway to add different elements to your slide. If I insert a picture outside the theme's placeholder, it might look a little boring, rough even. No border, no framing. Matt says don't despair. Matt shows us how to create a drop zone for a picture so it is framed. All right!! Matt also shows us how Keynote's layout guides materialize out of nowhere to help us postion stuff. Cool. Now you see 'em, now you don't! Matt uses image-fill to "fill" a shape with a picture (of Anna in this case), so now Anna is framed.

The members burst into group interaction at this point. Always great to have interaction, Show Notes is sorry if you missed it. Matt now goes back to our pre-game show. It has a lot of animations in it. The Build Inspector helps you create, edit, and inspect your animations. The Build Drawer contains all this power. Matt shows how one of the slides is put together in our pre-game show. He also talks about some of the different effects that are available to us. Animation includes how the elements of the slide build IN (or enter the slide) as well as how the elelments build OUT (or exit the slide). By combining different effects and different timings with several different elements, you can really make a slide come to life!

Matt now shows us a feature found on the Help menu. Want to learn iWork? Launch the Tour! The Tour is a Keynote presentation - if you reverse engineer the tour, you can learn a lot about how to achieve different effects and animations in Keynote. Show Notes looked for the Tour on its iMac, but couldn't find it. Helpfully the Tour has found its way to a Help menu near you. Matt gives us an example using one of the Tour slides. This also showed us how a collection of elements can be grouped together and then Keynote effects operate on the entire group as a single element. By combining many effects with several images you can create very sophisticated slides. Wow, Show Notes just said sophisticated, imagine that.

Member: How do the elements know where to stop?
Matt: Where you place the element on the slide determines where it ends up.

Matt show us another view.

Matt shows us another slide in the tour. This one contains hyperlinks! You can add links from the Hyperlink Inspector. Links to what? Other slides! AND, web pages! So you can branch to a whole different part of your slide show. And web pages? Wow, if you're connected to the Internet, the slide will bring in the web page live straight off the net.

Member: Can you include a movie file?
Matt: Yes, you sure can.

That is some of the things you can do with Keynote. Check it out!

The opening for our show was Keynote slides exported to iMovie.

If you export to Flash, will those links be live? Show Notes doesn't know the answer to that one! If you want to know, then off to the Experimental Lab with you! (Let us know what you find out!)

Keynote can do really cool stuff with your photos that you can't even do with iPhoto.

Thanks, Matt, for a cool look at Keynote!

Questions and Answers

Can you add music?
Yes, right out of iTunes. Play it once, or loop it.

SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT!

Has he no shame? Will these plug's ever stop? Check out Tim's blog at TimothyGodby.com. A cool Mac blog - it's coolness begs for your interaction. Release your inner refrigerator poet, um, in a blog kind of way. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say.

Give-away

Tonight's give-away is an Apple Liquid Refreshment Dispenser
Our winner tonight was Robbie Roof.

Wrap-up

As always, we appreciate the guys at iPlace for allowing us to meet there. Next month at our March meeting: Freeway 4 Pro, presented by Matt Chandler! It's a look at building websites without any knowledge of html. See you then!