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You mentioned that "Apple hasn’t done anything to improve the way that Keynote handles sound". Does that mean that there has been no change to Apple's miserable implementation of narration to slide shows? No way to play back a narrated slide show without starting at the beginning? No way to record a voiceover in segments (you could only record the whole dammm thing at once)?

In place of the WebView, now Apple includes a SFWebView Framework. Inability to display a webpage inline Keynote as well as the need for exporting to flash would be mitigated to an extent by the iWork.com online sharing. iWork.com Review has more details.

iphonedev said:

>Inability to display a webpage inline Keynote as well as the need for exporting to flash would be mitigated to an extent by the iWork.com online sharing.'

That sentence is half-nonsense. While the inability to export flash is "mitagated to an extent" with iWork.com, iWork.com is not even CLOSE to a replacement for inline webpage viewing in Keynote.

You said "If you create presentations for work or play and you don’t have to use PowerPoint for Microsoft Office compatibility, it’s worth the price of iWork." Since most people do have to use PP for compatibility, is there any reason to have both?

My thoughts...
First, I hadn't tried exporting a presentation to Flash, so I hadn't realized it was gone. I guess I will need to keep my old version too - as this is a valuable feature for some.
My gripes:
1. Apple still offer horrible printing features. Printing handouts in Keynote is terrible. I usually end up saving as PPT, and then printing handouts from PowerPoint. Also, file sizes for electronic handouts are either readable and huge, or small and not readable.
2. The 99-cents for Keynote Remote still annoys the heck out of me. iTunes Remote is free... Keynote Remote should be too for licensed users.
The Good:
In general, Keynote excels when PowerPoint fails... simple but classy backgrounds, dynamic slide transitions, and the new photo effects are great!
Even with the cons - I use Keynote almost exclusively, annoying people because I insist on using my own laptop for my presentations.

Unfortunately, Keynote is still lacks a bunch of features needed for technical academic presentation, and seems to be centered around transitions and animations.

Although the design interface of Keynote is really nice, and it works great on a Mac, it falls far short for those of use who must present on Windows machines running PowerPoint, or collaborate with Mac and Windows users on PowerPoint. The important ones to me are:

- Equations are converted to pictures and so are no longer editable in PowerPoint even though PowerPoint is capable of this.

- Path animations are removed when exported to PowerPoint even though PowerPoint can play these animations, and you can play and edit slides containing Animations that were created in PowerPoint Win. Powerpoint Mac will not create path animations, but it will play those created on PowerPoint Win.

- Although the idea of embedding slides makes things look tidy, it is functionally of little use, I am unable to bypass embedded slides and I am unable to link to hidden slides. So, there is no easy way to make a presentation where I link to normally hidden parts by a button or link. In Powerpoint I can create hidden slides and link to them so they only show up if I choose to click a link. This is really useful if you want to create a selections of extra hidden questions and problems that you access to help students.

iphonedev said:

What in the world is SFWebView Framework? What does it do? How do we use it?

And what makes you think iWork.com replaces exporting a Keynote presentation as a Flash movie? Do you think people only do it for reviews and not for actually using it as a presentation in FLV format?

I really like a lot of things about Keynote '09. But the web view seems like a random thing to remove without some kind of similar functionality. I can only hope this SFWebView Framework does that.

Lemme say, I ain't a fanboy of Apple or iWork.com. There are many lacunae in iwork.com itself that you can read in the review. If only you and @mistersquid used CmdCtrD, mitigate =/= replace.

About SFWebView, it turns out that it has much of the same functionalities as were in the KeyNote 08 framework, except that now it also caters to the needs of Pages and Numbers for online sharing. But that doesn't explain why Apple would exclude the inline rendering or flash exporting features. May be, and this is just a guess, the browser based interface to iwork.com would have better rendering abilities for web view than stand-alone.

There are many things Apple does that have little justification e.g. why wouldn't they allow PPC Macs to develop iPhone apps despite the SDK a universal binary and it works perfectly alright. Food for thought.

>{quote:title=Macworld wrote:}{quote}
>you can no longer export slide shows in Flash format. I won?t miss Flash?I can export to QuickTime and convert to Flash, if need be

I'm really disappointed by the lack of this feature. Keynote would save a nicely compressed swf version of the presentation ready for the web.

What you are describing is creating a video of the presentation and saving as a flash video. There is a difference.

Try it. Since you have both the new and old product, create a short presentation in both and save to flash using the old why and what you describe. See which one looks better and is a smaller file size.

Keynote while nice, still really needs a Windows "reader" application if it's ever to gain a foothold in academia. I almost always can't always attach my MacBook to the built-in system being used. And exporting as a Quicktime movie means I lose much of my control over switching backwards and forwards and possibilities to use the presenter display mode. And exporting to Powerpoint defeats the whole object o using Keynote in the first place!

Count me among the people who are totally disheartened by the omission of flash capability. For Keynote to be at all functional for me, I must be able to convert my presentations to something that anyone can use. I am in education and have developed narrated, somewhat interactive, but pretty basic, Keynote presentations. I convert these to Flash and load them to a course webpage for students to use. I don't need flashy transitions, I just need the presentations to work. Flash has worked great for me for over a year now.

The hyperlinks and and sound files that work fine in Keynote simply do not work in QuickTime. The resulting (but still faulty) QuickTime files are 15 to 20 times larger than the Flash files that actually do what I want. My typical Flash file size is 5 megs -- you do the math. I tried out a Quicktime conversion with the new Keynote 09. I can't comment on the file size or functionality -- it froze up in progress. The flash conversion in the Keynote 08 is just a matter of minutes.

I had read that Apple was battling with Adobe over Flash. Apparently users are the casualties. I can't upgrade to Keynote 09 because it just doesn't work. I can't upgrade to MS Office 08 because they crippled it for users who need macros. If we're lucky, these issues will be worked out in Keynote 2010 or MS Office 2012 .

Apparently most of the posters are PC users, Flash doesn't interact well with OSX and there are some codes there that slow it down. If you do need Flash then stick to PPT otherwise use Keynote if you need a presentation to truly reflect what you are.

Overall a good review. I use Keynote every week and the '09 version has brought several new features mentioned that I find very useful.
Another thing that is inexplicably missing, however, is the 2D transition called "flash" which is now nowhere to be found. I can't figure out why that would be deleted - I used it fairly often as it was a great transition.
So, question - is there a way, behind the scenes to get a transition from one version of Keynote into another? Or is this transition gone forever?