Apple IWork Keynote Is A Joke For Windows Users
Posted in Life and Thoughts on May 30, 2008
I downloaded a presentation made with Apple’s IWork Keynote and since I’m running windows, I can’t even find a single tool to open this file.
Apple created their own xml format called APXL, but so what? I know Mac users will brag how great their presentations looks like when they created them in iWorks, but who cares? You can only serve a small community (sometimes, maybe only yourself!).
There are in fact options to export them into ppt, pps, or QT, but there might be a chance where the presentation won’t look nice in Windows due to Keynote using so called “Quartz rendering technology” and real “true type fonts”!
Searching the Apple forums return me this:
A Windows-based Keynote viewer would be non-trivial, as a) Keynote uses a “bundle” document format (a Keynote “document” is actually a collection of files) that isn’t recognized by Windows, and so exchanging files would be complicated, and the document would still have to be “exported” in some fashion, and b) Keynote relies on various OS X-specific technologies, such as Quartz rendering, for much of its beautiful appearance, and porting those over to Windows would be extremely difficult.
Yeah, that’s so “right”. But what if the Keynote presentation wasn’t exported into any other Windows compatible formats as a start? Then it sounds like there’s nothing (yes, nothing!) on windows that can view the KeyNote presentation.
The only place for that poor keynote presentation file? It’s in my recycle bin!
The fact remains that Keynote presentations are vastly better than PowerPoint presentations.
Buy a Mac
Better or not, closed formats are unacceptable. Apple needs to get into the open standards game or they’ll end up no better than Microsoft.
GNU/Linux/Google have the right idea. Proprietary software is out.
Sounds to me like the creator doesn’t intend for it to be available on Windows machines.
If I make a Keynote presentation and want to make it available for any platform, I’ll export it as Quicktime. No big deal.
Closed formats are acceptable to me until a program using open formats is superior. So far, Keynote is gives me the best option for giving presentations — and it’s why I sneak my own Mac into meetings at work if I give an important presentation.
D’oh, there’s me emailing back for a PDF/PPT version, then.
It’s not even necessary to export it as Quicktime
you can also export it as a Powerpoint, editable in Microsoft Powerpoint…
That’s with iWork ‘08, so i’m not to sure about older versions.
Yup, I understand that is achievable, given that the creator/author put in that effort to export it at the first place. The problem here is if someone get a pure keynote presentation file, there’s no way of opening it in Windows.