Keynote Support

While every effort has been made to automate the handling of Keynote presentations there are some issues due to the limited support provided by Apple. The following are some issues that may come up as you use iPresent It with Keynote:

In order to automate the extraction of slides from Keynote Universal Access support must be turned on. iPresent It will ask you to activate this support if it finds Keynote and Universal Access isn't currently turned on. Without this support iPresent It will not be able to process Keynote presentations (although Keynote 1.x will work fine).

In order to properly managing the extraction of slides iPresent It must change some Keynote settings. In order for these settings to be reflected in Keynote's operations it must be quit and restarted. It is recommended that you not be editing a Keynote presentation when you launch iPresent It. Keynote should prompt you to save your work but accidents happen. Note that restarts are only required if the export settings don’t match iPresent It’s requirements (i.e. if you never change them Keynote will retain iPresent It’s settings).

The fact that iPresent It must use Universal Access to manipulate Keynote results in another subtle issue. When initiating an Export of images Keynote must be the front most application. iPresent It does its best to move Keynote to the front when required but it can't guarantee this. If you change applications/windows when iPresent It starts processing a Keynote presentation you could inadvertantly cause Keynote to miss command from iPresent It. If this happens iPresent It will show an error message indicating that it couldn't extract the slides. If this happens restart the process and wait for Keynote to start exporting images before continuing your work.

Hopefully the current limitations will be eliminated in future versions of Keynote. For the time being, please be sure to follow these guidelines.