Horribly addictive

Warning: do not go to this page if you don't have time for a horribly addictive little Flash game. If you do, I dare you to beat 1424.

Keynote 2.0.1 Export to QuickTime Problem and Workaround

I'm finishing up my next book, Creating Keynote Presentations with iWork : Visual QuickProject Guide, so I of course upgraded to Keynote 2.0.1 when it became available via Software Update last week. But then I noticed a problem: I was no longer able to export Keynote presentations as QuickTime movies. The export seemed to go well, but failed at the end with an error message indicating that I had either run out of disk space or there was some other error. Since I have 70 GB free on my hard disk, the former wasn't the problem.

It looks as though a bug introduced in 2.0.1 is the problem. In Keynote's Preferences, there's an option to "Exit presentation after last slide." When this is turned off (it is on by default), when running the presentation you can't inadvertently advance past the last slide, which drops out of the presentation. You won't leave the presentation until you explicitly end slideshow mode by pressing the Escape key. This is a good option for many presenters, but it now causes QuickTime export to fail. The simple workaround is to turn the option on when exporting QuickTime movies from Keynote, but turn it off before you give the presentation.

Thanks to the members of the Keynote mailing list for the solution to this one.

Charles Darwin Has A Posse

Charles Darwin Has A Posse has free bookmarks and stickers in PDF format, saying (obviously) "Charles Darwin Has A Posse." I love it!

Some of the PDFs also have great quotes, such as:

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Oooh, and they also have a CafePress store — I really want the women's tank top.

In which I disagree with Scoble

Robert Scoble says:

…the whole blogosphere is an insider's club. How can you tell that? Well, when I got to blogger conferences I see about 70% Macintoshes, but when I fly on airplanes I see only about 5% Macs. That tells me that we're self selecting and different than the general population.

Translation: if we don't get a more diverse set of people doing blogs we'll make mistakes if we only listen to bloggers.

My take: yes and no. Only listening to bloggers is, of course, a bad idea. But disregarding the fact that bloggers tend to be early adopters is a bad idea, especially for someone from Microsoft.

That 70% of the people at tech conferences (because it ain't just blogging conferences that have that kind of statistic) are using Macs isn't because those people are outliers; it's that those people are early adopters and influencers. Those 95% Wintel users at airports are using those machines because that's what the boss gave them. The 70% of conference-goers that have Macs chose what they want to work with, and made the informed decision not to buy a Wintel machine.

If, like Scoble, I worked for Microsoft, the fact that influencers are leaning so strongly Mac-wards would seriously worry me. Unless it's still true that MS is makes more money (on average) per Mac user than per Windows user (is that stat still true?); in that case, I'd be thinking about buying MS stock.

Ajaxian.com

A new weblog worth checking out: the Ajaxian.com blog. From their initial post:

Ajaxian.com isn't about exotic new web technologies. It's about exploring how some of our old friends (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript) can be used to do very interesting things that for the past few years we've been telling our employers can't be done in a conventional browser.

The core tool at the center of these new tricks is XMLHttpRequest, a JavaScript object that enables easy asychronous requests to be made without a page reload; such requests return XML. This technique has been called ajax (asychronous JavaScript and XML).

After years of focusing on server-side frameworks to keep life entertaining, its great fun to be innovating on the client once again.

Yep, it's starting to get interesting 'round here again. Coooool.