Apple’s Keynote

When I’m on the verge of buying a Mac I tend to get a little obsessive. Erik’s had to physically restrain me once or twice. So here’s a telling of my favorite Mac presentation experience to help me vent.

A presentation for a college class I was taking warranted a PowerPoint visual aid. Since everyone else was using one it would look half-assed if you didn’t slap something together. PowerPoint is akin to a 60-year-old man who looks 100 due to years of smoking, malnutrition, and neglect. Also I honestly believe that for the public good Microsoft needs to hard-code a provision into the next version of PowerPoint explicitly disallowing the use of Comic Sans in any presentation under any circumstances.

Our teacher requested that anyone requiring the projector set up before class to minimize situations such as: “Sorry everyone, I’m not sure what’s ? let see ? it was working earlier ? well I guess I’ll just have to reboot.” After watching a myriad of uninspired, plain, illegible mockeries of color and form it came to be my turn. I stode to the front with my Powerbook in hand, lid closed, Apple logo facing the class, effortlessly hanging from it’s industrial strength aluminum handle. Then I placed it on the table amidst the graveyard of plastic wintel laptops and opened the lid. In the second-and-a-half of time it took for the screen to light and the machine to wake I had plugged the projector into the VGA port. Another second-and-a-half and Keynote’s opening slide appeared on the big-screen. I clicked play and we were off!

This Keynote presentation was comprised of a gorgeous Apple template; anti-aliased text and drop shadows where appropriate; dithered, variable, alpha-channel transparency for the graphics; and hardware-accelerated slide transitions both 2D and 3D.

After it was finished, I unplugged the projector, closed the lid and the Powerbook was swiftly asleep and safe for transport. As I made my way back to my seat, leaving the unsightly wintel table alone with only the repugnant company of each other, one of the students spoke up, “Hey was that that new Apple PowerPoint thing?” I gave him a knowing, curt nod, “Keynote? Yeah.”

I’d like to think that I really made a difference in a few people’s lives that day. But maybe I’m just being pretentious. ;-)