[mnesset]

I created a major Keynote 2 presentation to be delivered to my Macintosh User Group yesterday. Did the creation on my G5 2 gig with 2 gigs of RAM. Everything worked fine on that machine with two displays. The presentation was very large (84 slides and grew to a size of 64mb). I wondered why it was so large and worried that when I transferred it to my PowerBook G4 (1ghz, with 1 gig of RAM) that it might not be able to handle it. When I tried it out (before the presentation), only using the PowerBook’s screen, it worked a little bit slower than on the G5 but was usable. I should also mention that there were several web view slides within the presentation because I was demonstrating searching on the internet and wanted to switch back and forth from Keynote to my browser. I should also mention that I had created a new theme for the background of each slide (did this according to explicit directions from a Lynda.com tutorial). I did not transfer the theme to the PowerBook, however, not even thinking that this might be a problem.

Anyway, when I got to my computer club and began the presentation, very quickly my PowerBook slowed to a crawl and I couldn’t continue. I kept getting freezes, with the dreaded spinning beachball. We tried using the prepared presentation (I had copied it to a CD) with a more recent PowerBook that also had Keynote 2 installed. Same result.

Does anyone have any explanation as to what went wrong? Also, the presentation was developed in the screen resolution 1024x768.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[mnesset]

This is the same poster as above --- thought of a couple of additions to my above post:

I did have a very good, live connection to the internet when I did the presentation at my user group meeting. Also, I was connected to a VGA projector, alternate screen. The screen resolution of my PowerBook was set to 1280 x 854 and the projector to 1024 x 768.

Thanks,
Mary

[Sophus]

Did any of the two computers you used for the presentation have Aspell installed?

Aspell is incompatible and will cause the kinds of freezeing and hiccups you described. Aspell is a third party open source spellchecker with additional languages and better vocabulary/dictionary than the one currently supplied with OSX.

The problem with Aspell affects both Pages and Keynote 2.

[mnesset]

No, I do not have Aspell installed. I had read about this incompatibility on another forum, but thanks for your input.

Mary

[mnesset]

OK, for all of those of you who have lost sleep over my problem
I have discovered the problem. As I suspected, the culprit was the “web view” feature. I made a copy of my original keynote file and then eliminated all of the “web view” pages. That took the file size of my keynote document from 62mb all the way down to 2mb!!!

Then, I made screen shots of each of the “web view” pages from the original, converted them into gif files and added them, one by one, to my new copied keynote file. Even after added all of those gif pages, and making them all into internet links, the final filesize of the keynote copied file was still only 2mb. So, my conclusion is that using a lot of “web view” pages enormously increases your filesize of your keynote document, which has the effect of dramatically slowing down your computer’s ability to portray the presentation, especially when using a projector or alternate display of any kind.

So, my advice --- stay away from “web view”!!!

Mary

[Big Mac]

Wow, good cautionary tale for the rest of us. You would think Apple would have the sense to test applications before shipping them, but maybe my traditional view of responsible software deployment no longer applies. . . Hope your presentation wasn't totally wrecked.

[mnesset]

Well, since I was trying to also show how great Keynote 2 was, it did kind of wreck the presentation. I was still able to give my group the content of the presentation just by going onto the live internet and showing them what I had. They were pleased with the content but somewhat concerned about the usability of Keynote 2!

Actually, I really like most of the new features of Keynote 2 but am very dubious about the "web view" feature. I don't know if I just implemented it wrong, or if everyone who uses it has had the same experience . . .

Mary

[Cadaver]

Here's to the rapid appearance of Keynote 2.01...!