I stopped by the Apple booth today, and got the pitch about what's new in Keynote 3. It looks like it is mostly just whiz-bang effects, like new transitions, themes, and 3D charts (you can apparently change the angle of the light source and the texture). You can also put drop-shadows on pictures. Overall, it didn't seem like a really compelling upgrade.

They have also touched up the exporting features -- you can export to iDVD now, to make a DVD of your presentation. I also got an extensive demo of the Quicktime exporter, which seems to work fairly well (although it was a little slow rendering the cube-rotate transition).

Overall, my beefs with Keynote remain. The presentations that I tend to make are rather text heavy, and light on the media. The Apple guy showed me how you can type an outline of your presentation in Pages, and then paste that into Keynote (which will automatically create slides and bullet points). But this functionality is not even close to what you can do with Word and PowerPoint over in Office 2004.

So, if you need to give a presentation that has a lot of images, charts, and videos, to an audience that is entirely local (like Steve Jobs does), then you should check out Keynote. If you're like me, and your presentations are rather text-heavy, and the audience is partially in the room and partially remote, it looks like PowerPoint is still the better bet.

-Andy.

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