Tom Gorham
Apple’s keynote addresses often offer up clues to what’s in store for its presentation application, but deciphering them isn’t always easy…
Duplicating Apple keynote effects can be tough. As Apple’s star has moved into the ascendant over the past few years, the minutiae of its keynotes have been analysed at frustrating length by technology pundits worldwide.
However, within this group of analysts lies a smaller and more extreme subset: those who study the software behind the presentation rather than the announcements. The Keynote within the keynote, if you will.
Having noted that Apple CEO Steve Jobs and other Apple presenters occasionally tease us with effects and transitions not present in any publicly available version of Keynote, spotting these can provide small clues about the future of iWork’s presentation application. A case in point: the announcement of the 3 billionth App Store download during Jobs’ iPad presentation in January was accompanied by a Keynote dust cloud effect applied to an element as it dropped to the bottom of the slide. ‘Unreleased feature!’ cried the Keynote junkies excitedly.
It was only when a friend asked me whether it was possible to animate a Keynote chart to show a chart rescaling as new data was added to it that I temporarily joined this gang of Keynote watchers. I remembered that I’d seen such a transition demonstrated by Phil Schiller during last year’s WWDC 2009 keynote, and when I looked back at the video of the event in iTunes, the stunning effect is shown – at around the three-minute mark if you’re interested. To display the exponential growth of ‘OS X’ active users, Schiller displayed a chart showing steady progress over a number of years, but to compensate for the explosion in Mac OS X use, the slide then adjusted its scale before adding a further animation. Schiller’s only – and in my subsequent view utterly unhelpful – explanation of this effect was to desultorily comment ‘Keynote, Magic Move,’ accompanied by a happy thumbs-up from him and murmurs of appreciation by the audience. I could swear there was a discernible – if understandable – touch of smugness, too.
Many Keynote aficionados have put this down as another unreleased feature. However, rashly working on the assumption that somehow the effect could be replicated with existing tools, I began a day-long exercise of trial, error and taking Schiller’s name in vain to reproduce the effect.
I expect my initial complacency arose because creating a chart so that its elements appear one by one is a fairly straightforward process. For example, if you have a slide with a 3D bar chart selected – the process is slightly different for other chart types – you click the Build In tab in the Build inspector and under the Delivery menu, choose By Element in Series, and Grow as the effect. Set the duration for each build and – Jobs’ your uncle – chart animation.
The critical part of ensuring smooth animation is to adjust the Build From menu to ensure that elements that aren’t part of the chart – for example, its background grid – aren’t included in the animation. You need to know the order of elements here, and you can see these in the Build Inspector’s drawer. In most cases, the background grid is the first element of the chart, so by selecting ’2′, you can ensure it isn’t included.
The default animation requires user interaction to trigger each element’s animation. To automate this, in the Build Order drawer you used to check on the element order, select Series Elements and choose ‘Automatically after prior build’ from the Start Build menu. Set a short delay between each element.
However, the rescaling effect that Schiller showed in his presentation was a little different, and I’m not sure he was being entirely truthful when he put the chart effect solely down to Magic Move. Magic Move can automatically apply scaling or moving transitions across slides, but while it works with images and shapes, it simply doesn’t play well with charts.
My guess is that images were used to create the effect rather than native charts, as that’s what I had to use when I tried to replicate the rescaling effect.
I first had to create two slides – one containing the chart before it was rescaled and one after. On the second slide showing the rescaled chart, I used the Graphic Inspector to adjust its opacity so it would gradually fade during the transition. I added a second chart behind the rescaled chart with x and y axes extended to take account of the additional data I’d add later. The tricky thing here was to match up the axes of both these charts so they aligned. It required a bit of fiddling in the Chart Inspector, adjusting the axes values under the Chart tab.
Furthermore, I also had to create copies of these two slides as images through Keynote’s File > Export menu. Under the Images tab, select the slide number to export and choose a suitable format – PNG or Tiff – to export the slide.
To create the effect, the first slide should contain the original chart. I added the first image – a copy of this chart – to the second slide and the image of the rescaled chart to a third slide. I used Keynote’s rulers and guides to ensure that the chart origins and axes were consistent across the slides.
The final slide contained the rescaled chart. On this I added new chart data through the Chart Inspector’s ‘Edit data’ button and added basic build effects to animate the appearance of this information.
Fitting it together was a question of adding the necessary transitions. You don’t need any transition between the first and second slides, so that between the chart and the image, to borrow words from the late Eric Morecambe, you can’t see the join. It’s between the second and the third slides, which both contain images, that you use Magic Menu to perform the scaling effect. With the second slide selected, open the Slide Inspector and select Magic Menu from the Effects menu.
The duration of the effect is a personal choice, but I’ve found that around two seconds lets users see the scaling effect most clearly. Make sure the Transition menu is set to ‘automatically’ so the transition occurs without user interaction. When the effect is applied, it should give the effect of smooth scaling.
As with the first and second slides, there’s no need for any transition effects between the third and fourth slide. When I added the additional data to this fourth slide, I wanted to ensure I didn’t redraw the same chart elements that had already appeared in the first slide. To do this, I adjusted the number in the slide’s Build Inspector’s Build From menu so that the chart elements already drawn were ignored and only the one added in this final slide was animated.
The effect was achieved after a fashion, although I’m not convinced my labour was worth it, as the results were nowhere near as polished as the chart in Schiller’s Apple presentation. However, the process resulted in a new respect for Keynote watchers, and a shared hope that Schiller’s feature makes it into the next version of iWork.
