6 ms·
Apple built Keynote because Steve Jobs hates PowerPoint
- mahrain 15y agoFrom what I know Steve used to do his NeXT presentations in Lighthouse Design's Concurrence, and he continued to use an OpenStep machine well into his return to Apple.
- arn 15y agoAs noted in the comments of the article, Jobs was a big fan of Concurrence which was developed on the NeXT platform by Lighthouse Design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design Wikipedia also says that's what he used: Prior to using Keynote, Jobs had used Concurrence, from Lighthouse Design, a similar product which ran on the NeXTSTEP and OpenStep platforms Jobs spoke highly of Lighthouse design during the 1997 WWDC video that was circulating around recently. Keynote was inspired by Concurrence. People noticed the similarities right away: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=218463&postcount=33 http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=218463&postco...
- mturmon 15y agoRoger Rosner, one of the founders of Lighthouse (before Jonathan Schwartz was in the company), now bears the title "VP iWork", and gave the demo of "Pages in the Cloud" for the WWDC keynote. Roger's demo starts at minute 92 in the keynote, http://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2011/ http://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2011/ . So yeah, Jobs seems particularly interested in the relationship of NeXT, Lighthouse, and iWork/Keynote.
- btilly 15y agoIn fact at one point Apple threatened a patent lawsuit against Sun, and Sun responded by pointing out that they could easily sue over how similar Keynote was to Concurrence. Neither lawsuit ever got filed. See http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/former-sun-ceo-schwartz-discusses-apple-lawsuits-and-microsoft-royalty-demands-20100310/ http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/former-sun-ceo-schwartz-d... for verification.
- rbanffy 15y agoSigh... Imagine if McNeally decided to base his Office-killer on Lighthouse's codebase instead of StarOffice... It could have actually killed Office.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y agoSadly no it couldn't. Office's dominance or otherwise isn't down to functionality, it's down to corporate habit, compatibility, user familiarity and a big ol' dose of FUD about using something different. Until you find a way to deal with those for major corporate clients you could produce the best productivity suite in the whole world and you still wouldn't shift Office.
- Steko 15y agoStrongly disagree here. Functionality wise, Office (read Excel and Word) murdered everything else in the early-mid 90s. There are certainly other reasons that contributed greatly to Office's monopoly but I don't see FUD as one of any consequence.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y agoI'm not saying that's how it got where it is, I'm saying that's one of the things that's keeping it there.
- neilk 15y agoAgreed, but just because they dominated a competitive field with features doesn't mean that strategy will work now, where there's a near-monopoly.
- Duff 15y agoNo way! Look at the Office 2007 transition. They fundamentally changed the UI, broke alot of (poorly conceived and implemented) customer-implemented applications and changed the file format. They were in many respects new applications. I worked for a very large organization that very strongly considered a major embrace of OpenOffice. The lawyers loved it, ODF scratched number of political itches, and Microsoft Office spend is incredible. User preference is weak when you're converting a $10,000,000 annual Office subcription spend into $500k of support staff expenses. Problem was, when the time for talking ended and testing began, the application was universally reviled. The problem wasn't that users didn't like the apps, but they couldn't get things done.
- spitfire 15y agoThe Lighthouse design apps got me through college. I wrote all my papers in openwrite with mathematica on a NeXT turboslab. Truely fantastic software years ahead of everything else. I still want a native Quantrix clone on osx. (Java just won't do.)
- alexophile 15y ago"Apple built Keynote because everyone hates PowerPoint."
- kitsune_ 15y agoIs that Comic Sans?
- cantbecool 15y ago"Good artists copy, great artists steal." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU The second video in the original posters link, the Titanium Powerbook unveiling, Jobs had a lot of spunk compared to the most recent unveilings.
- flomo 15y agoForget Keynote, the video reminded me of how influential the PowerBook G4 has been. "Sex" is right - the MB Pro on my desk still shares the same basic design as its predecessor from 10 years ago. It has become timeless, like the original ThinkPad design.
- bonaldi 15y agoish. The MB is based on the aluminium PBG4 which was bigger and rather less good-looking than the TiBook. But the TiBook's painted kept flaking off, and that wasn't sexy in the slighest
- bambax 15y agoEverybody hates PowerPoint, and every version is worse than the previous one. For example, n PPT 97 you could adjust shapes but in '2000 and later versions they line up "automatically", meaning that when you move one it gets off the grid and it's subsequently impossible to realign it by hand. But there is a good competitor to PowerPoint in MS Office: Visio. Visio is a great, powerful, professional piece of software, feature-rich and not that hard to learn. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visio Visio first shipped in 1992; but it doesn't say if there ever was a Mac version. Was there?
- JonnieCache 15y agoOS X already has a better visio: http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/ http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/
- gte910h 15y agoAnd the more expensive mac version is compatible with visio
- kenjackson 15y agoA quick look makes it look like a simple version of Visio, but this is just from looking at the web page. For example, does it have diagram validation? This way your governance or architecture team can define the rules and ensure the diagrams follow them. Or can you set a schedule for it to sync to data sources (actually I couldn't even find how to sync to a data source at all)? And this is probably in there, but they make no mention of it, but can you host your diagram as a hyperlinked webpage?
- protomyth 15y agoNo, no it doesn't. Visio is a much better product with decent templates, preferences that stick, and shape arranging and editing that lets you get a lot done. Scaling also works well in Visio and not so well in OmniGraffle. I have used both a lot (Visio when it came on the sample disc before it was a Microsoft product, OmniGraffle Pro since 1.0), and have finally given up on the idea that OmniGraffle will be as good as Visio. I really wish Microsoft would port it or someone else really look at the fundamentals of what Visio is capable of.
- davidmat 15y ago"PowerPoint is by far the worst app in the Microsoft Office suite" Really? I nominate MS Word for that title. Maybe we should hold a poll :)
- lparry 15y agoWasn't Access a part of office?
- baconner 15y agoI was about to say this... access is by far the worst thing in office.
- Duff 15y agoIf you say that, you don't know anything about Access. Access is a veritable swiss army knife for non-computer people. A smart business user can do all sorts of things in an afternoon that normally require a programmer a few days to get done. Example: My wife is a financial person whose employer doesn't have $350k to create custom reports in whatever Oracle nighmare her billing and finance system is implemented in. She can, however, export some data and do the reporting/analysis that she needs to get her job done. The new versions are super-powerful. If your employer publishes lots of list content on SharePoint, you can treat the lists as a sort of database table in Access, and do lots of ad-hoc reporting with a tool that is right there on your PC anyway. That said, Access gets evil when some dope decides to implement some critical application for a global company on his PC.
- baconner 15y agoTo be fair its been years since I've touched access so maybe its much better now than it was. Also perhaps I'm blaming the paintbrush when I should also be blaming the painter which is going on regarding PowerPoint in this thread. That said I've had to unscrew a number of spaghetti coded access based shadow systems of the "why are you running your business on this!?" type in the past and I do think these tools are to an extent responsible for leading users into the wrong paths. PowerPoint for instance guides users right into bullet point hell. You can create beautiful presentations with it but it leads you in the wrong direction from the start. The danger of access (and excel) IMO is they encourage users who don't regularly build software to create complex systems without good tools to test and verify what they're doing and in a totally disconnected fashion. They also lack an audit trail which enables all sorts of I'll advised and sometimes unethical number fudging. Generally speaking I consider numbers out of these systems suspect until I understand how they work. as long as they're simple its manageable but they get complex quickly with no control and no record of how they got the data to a given state. This disconnection bears similar risks as a developer who goes for months without checking in code only to drop their masterpiece in on code cut day and inevitably shoot everyone in the foot. I sympathize with people whose choice is between building a shadow system and having to deal with a Oracle's billing department (shudder). I just think there can be better solutions between "user is totally at the mercy of n thousand $/hr report writing consultants" and "user is forced to code their own disconnected data system without a net." In that situation I'd probably be recommending option #2 as well but with a please KISS warning. Every time I read about a company making a big public mistake because they made an error in a user developed shadow system it breaks my heart a little. I suppose its as much or more of a company culture and procedural issue than it is a tooling issue but the tools we make are responsible in some part. I think we can do better without throwing user empowerment completely out the window or spending big money to get a simple report. I think this is the most important ongoing challange in business intelligence (despite how cool "big data" is at the moment).
- warmfuzzykitten 15y agoOk, Concurrence, but the name "Keynote" certainly is suggestive.
- krashidov 15y agoI don't think powerpoint is all that bad. It's people who don't know how to present is what makes it look bad. Especially when they fill the screen with every single word they say.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y agoIt's a fair point but ideally a presentation application should do everything it can to make you look good. PowerPoint's issue is that it doesn't look great to start with which is one of the reasons people try to "sex up" their presentations which is where all the crap starts appearing. If PowerPoint produced better looking presentations as standard (essentially had better templates which still, even in the latest versions it doesn't), people might have less reason to give free reign to their stupidity.
- kenjackson 15y agoI disagree. The problem with PowerPoint templates is that everyone has them. When you see a PowerPoint presentation your first thought is, "this is a PowerPoint presentation -- I know that template". With that said, I think PowerPoint is actually really good. And most presentations surprisingly good. In fact, I tend to think people tend to do a better job with their PowerPoint presentations than they do the actual paper that goes with it. The spend more effort distilling their thoughts down to what really matters, rather than endless exposition. I just think its become trendy to hate on PowerPoint.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y agoI disagree. I've got Office 2011 for the Mac and Office 2010 for Windows. One of the first things I did was go and look to see if they'd improved the templates and they simply aren't very good. I agree that people get bored of seeing the same ones over and over but that's part of the same problem - with so few good choices people all migrate around the small number of least bad options. As for it being trendy to hate on PowerPoint, I don't know who you hang out with but talking about any presentation software in any terms isn't trendy among people I see... I get that certain views become fashionable but I don't think PowerPoint is the sort of thing that people round on in that way, it's a bit to "meh" to generate a bandwagon.
- tensor 15y agoKeynote would be absolutely amazing if it allowed for one thing: graphic/pdf objects to be anchored inline with text. With this, latex rendered formula could be included in a far easier manner. Most CS academics use macs at this point, and I'm sure engineers would find it invaluable as well. Apple has been ignoring its more technical users and focussing on the the masses for a while now. It's rather disappointing.
- temphn 15y agoLaTeXit is pretty good for this purpose.
- tensor 15y agoYep, but unless I am mistaken and a newer version has fixed this, you can't put an equation into a line of text. You need to position it in an absolute sense and leave space in the text using spaces. The feature I'm suggesting about would allow anchoring an image to a character and allow the text to flow around it.
- bonzoesc 15y agoI disagree. Most slides benefit from having less content on them. A better way to jam different kinds of content together on one slide really doesn't help your viewers. And you can be disappointed in Apple focusing on consumers, but you can't say it's not working for them.
- juiceandjuice 15y agoYou obviously have no frame of reference to this conversation. This isn't Hawking writing to the masses, he's talking about technical presentations.
- bonzoesc 15y agoMy frame of reference is that most academic technical presentations are bad, just like most software produced during university research is bad to the point of being impossible to run anywhere else. You may feel that the information in a single slide with three formulas and a few bullets of prose makes it worth the effort to put up with a bad slide, but that doesn't make it a good slide by any means.
- temphn 15y agoKeynote's one minor-but-annoying limitation is that you can't change default parameters globally for animations.
- taa4321 15y agoPowerpoint is my favorite MS product by far (and even on its own). It is very much the PC to Keynote's Apple. Powerpoint is awful out of the box, but if you know what you are doing, you can have total control over the diagrams. David Byrne loves it too ;)
- ktarnowski 15y agoThis is a good example of what happens when a driven person finds a problem that, in his opinion, needs fixing. In this case Steve Jobs, who's famous for his keynotes, speeches etc., found that existing solutions do not suit his needs and, what's more important from the business perspective, there's a bunch of people who feel the same. So, as a brilliant entrepreneur, he made the Keynote happen.