I sometimes wonder if Keynote will suffer now that Jobs is gone and the Apple keynotes have gone to using videos ever since the pandemic. I don’t think Cook ever liked doing the live demos, so the videos are likely here to stay. The presentations Jobs did were a big driver of Keynote’s development.

If you haven’t seen it, there is an interview with the guy who put those presentations together for 20 years. It’s pretty interesting.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210205063616/https://www.cake....

I don’t think that will affect it. Apple’s public use of Keynote has always been very basic

That thing about the presentation having a color scheme match the emotion and villains and heroes.

Is there an essay that analyzes the iPhone launch as you would a book or a movie?

They mention a book, book seems like it never came out?

Wow, I didn't know about that Keynote feature, that's amazing. it really shows the extent to which they care about visual design as an end result.

I desperately wish Apple's office apps got more development. They have the potential to be world-beating (especially Numbers) but Apple seems content to just update a couple of minor features a year and leave it at that.

> They have the potential to be world-beating (especially Numbers)

Don't sleep on Numbers. It doesn't get a lot of attention but it can do some nice things in a much less bloated interface than Excel.

It's had regular expressions for a while for example, while Excel is just getting them.

I love being able to put multiple spreadsheets on a page and arrange them in whatever way you want. Reminds me of Lotus Improv [1] from back in the day.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv

I like numbers, but AFAIK its file format is not open and Apple just dropped support for older versions some years ago.

Imagine not being able to open a spreadsheet from 5 years ago.

> put multiple spreadsheets on a page

I’ve been hot for this feature since the Improv days — I browbeat the AppleWorks people to support it better, and when a bunch of them split off to build <app I don’t remember the name of> I made sure they knew this was a key feature.

Ragtime still supports it as far as I know. https://www.ragtime.de/start.html?lang_id=en

Ragtime is still a thing??? I had the pleasure of working in Ragtime 2.5 and then 3 in 199x on a MacPlus (I had a job translating the manual for Cricket Presents - “PowerPoint” before PowerPoint - from English to danish).

It was one of the reasons I ‘got in to computers’(Macs) - it felt like it could ‘do it all’ and was so easy to use (at the time x86 based pc’s did not do the same for me…

Remarkably enough it seems so. Unfortunately I've never been in a place where 1. I needed its particular skillset 2. It was the best candidate for the job.

I love the idea of having multiple worksheets in a particular document so much, and yet 99.9% of the time I just throw open a google sheet and start throwing in numbers. The collaboration smoothness is a beats-all-else feature.

Keynote is absolutely the presentation software a designer would create, if they didn't have to do it while being saddled with inappropriate technologies.

I'm a pragmatist and I understand why collaborative editing and web-based "files" won out...but when you use a well-crafted piece of desktop software like Keynote it really makes you wistful for what might have been. People have forgotten how much of a hole you dig for yourself in when you have to build everything in the browser.

You prompted me to try out the little-known web version of Keynote on iCloud.com. I expected it to be surprisingly good if not quite up to the desktop standard, since Apple's front end web teams do amazing work. And sure enough, that's what it is.

I focused on animation features and it has most of those available in the desktop version, but it's missing a few (e.g. action build effects). It's also missing some of the image adjustments. But it's got Magic Move, and shape subtraction/intersection[1]. Most importantly feels pretty good to use, though it takes a while to load (on Chromium). I've no idea if they implemented that inner-detail object alignment - don't have an easy way of testing it.

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/combine-or-break-apa... - note the feature about breaking apart SVG images too, I wonder if that's related to the inner-detail trick.

My only counter to this is that after, what, two _decades_, Apple _still_ has not added the ability to adjust number boxes with the up/down arrows on the keyboard (like text size for example). A designer would have included this on day 1, it’s such a common UI pattern in design tools.

If anyone on the iWork team is reading this, _please_ get to that Radar.

In my experience of many years, not only is Keynote fantastic, but Pages is better than Word and Numbers is better than Excel (though not the extensive Excel ecosystem).

I agree. I recently tried to do something in MS Office that was fairly simple in Pages: create a straightforward invoice.

I discovered that Word doesn’t even support formulae in its tables, which came as a great surprise. Apparently I needed to do this in Excel, which of course meant that the whole document needed to be written as fixed-width cells. This totally sucked for my use case.

Not too long ago I had to write a short paper in the current version of Word for Mac for a class I was taking and was surprised at how frustrating the experience was, in several ways feeling like stepping back in time a couple decades. Thankfully assignments since have accepted PDFs so using Pages is no problem.

Keynote is awesome. Last I checked a few years ago though Numbers was nowhere even close to Excel. No dynamic array formulas, Power Query, lambda functions, VBA, etc. All are pretty essential if you're doing anything beyond basic spreadsheets but I may need to checkout Numbers again.

I should have qualified "better". I find Numbers easier to use for basic spreadsheet tasks. Advanced, programming-like tasks are better in Excel, which has many more advanced features. I don't think Numbers is Turing complete, but then again I tend to use Python rather than Excel for advanced math processing.

Word has some features that Pages doesn't have, but they're not commonly used, and if you're doing any kind of page layout, Pages is __much__ easier to work with than MS Word.

Agreed. I've been using Pages quite a lot during the past year, growing frustrated with Word, and Pages is surprisingly good. It is much easier to use and to get nice results.

> Numbers is better than Excel

???????

Nothing is better than Excel.

fair point :)

I love Keynote, but after spending a lot of time in LaTeX Beamer when almost anything can be changed temporally within a slide using overlays, Keynote has frustrating limits. For example, you can't animate changing the background color of a table cell.

Also, its tools for editing embedded videos are quite less capable than PowerPoint's.

Not sure if PowerPoint can do the table cell thing. But overall, I still feel the perfect slide making software doesn't exist yet.

Agree 1000%

After I struggled with PowerPoint and Google Slides, Keynote was what I was super comfortable with and could very easily express what I wanted to. It’s the first tool I reach out to. I hope Apple keeps this alive for a long time.

I was a speaker at this years Figma Config (ends tomorrow) and we all had to use keynote since it has way better support for video and animations than goog.

I’m sure that won’t be the case next year with this new announcement.

Keynote is great if you are making a presentation for yourself and you don't need to share or collaborate on it. Otherwise, interoperability trumps features, and either Google Slides or PowerPoint is good enough and more likely to be compatible with your collaborators. It is sad, I'd love to use Keynote too, but the sharing barrier is just not worth it in 99% of my use cases.

edit: I think Figma slides has an uphill battle ahead for the same reason.

Keynote has had real time collaboration[0] for years. It's great.

[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/intro-to-collaborati...