I had my PhD defense this week, and for the first and last time, I used Apple Keynote for making the slides. The slides were overly fancy, in fact it was so fancy that it crashed once during my defense.

Here’s a taste of some of the animations:

Below let me tell you some of the problems, ranging from annoying to outright bugs.

The Keynote is at Version 15.3 (7050.0.24)

Keynote Crashes During Presentation

It happened during my defense talk.

Grouping Destroys Orientation

First of, there’s a long standing issue that if you have a connector, grouping the object it connects to into some group without the connector is going to cause the connector to be messed up.

But turns out you can get messed up orientation out of nowhere.

For example, here, I have a semi-complex construction but with all Keynote native objects. Focus on the Line object, since it’s not a “connector”, you normally don’t expect it to get messed up by grouping, and yet:

Multi-Select Build in Animation

Build In is Apple’s name for “animations that make an object appear”.

My gripe here is that SOME effects, in particular Dissolve, only can be picked SOMETIMES when you select multiple objects, here’s a table summarizing the situation

Oh, and the most annoying case this shows up?

When you want to animate these lines as Line Draw, you have to do the ONE BY ONE, because multi-select lines don’t allowe you to apply Line Draw, and grouped object doesn’t have Line Draw at all:

“Object Identity” for Magic Move

Keynote also has a between-slide transition animation where it can “reuse” objects it consider to be the same across pages:

The problem is it has an unintuitive algorithm for what are considered “identical”

In the .gif above, the “bump” curve is a bent Line object. Turns out, if you do anything to a Line, including simply scaling it, it’s no longer considered to be “the same object”.

So how does the above gif work? Turns out if you “group” another invisible Line with the first Line, the group now can be scaled and Keynote will consider them to be the same object.

Opacity Gripe

1. When you group an object with an image together, now you can’t change opacity of the group at all
2. If you want to “grey out” any objects or groups that had some opacity applied, now you better take a screenshot of the whole thing and grey out the screenshot

Use of Purple to Mean AI

Apple seems to be using the color purple to indicate something is AI related, such as these buttons that generate image from text, or speaker notes from slides, or straight slides from text.

But one of these are not AI, it’s opening the image in a separate application called Pixelmator Pro.

The funnier part is that App has a RED icon:

Pixelmator Pro Silently Breaks File for Users

If you edited your image with Keynote’s Edit in Pixelmator Pro button, the embeded image file will be converted from, say, .png to .pxd file, so later you can re-edit it.

The problem? If you open this Keynote file on a computer without Pixelmator Pro installed, it just silently breaks:

• There’s no promopt asking you to install it
• The image looks like a huge x in playback

Double-Click to Bend a Line

If you have a 2-point line from the Draw with Pen tool, you can double click that line to add control points to bend it:

But if you inserted with normal line object, you CAN NOT double click to bend the line:

Direction of a Line

Depening on what have you done to a Line, its “start” and “end” may switch direction 11 You can do this by making a line, and drag its original left end point to the right, past its original right point. This seems to “flip” the line on the 2D plane that is your screen in a way that’s invisible. .

The result is that, despite your second “Endpoint” is arrow, which is usually where the line “ends”, when you animate it, it goes THE OTHER WAY:

You Cannot Animate Cells in a Table

Just… why? This means if you want text in a table to appear gradually, you need to have fun with a dozen of text boxes