Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Apple Publishes Keynote XML Schema

Posted by pudge on from the because-computers-are-just-too-fast dept.

grouchomarxist writes "Apple has published a technote on the XML file format (APXL schema) used by their new presentation application Keynote. They've also created a mailing list for those interested in writing Keynote tools." I am so there.

6 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. Adapt Axpoint to Keynote? by Void · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Maybe one should fork the excellent-but-still-buggy-and-incomplete AxPoint system to be keynote compatible. For those that don't know axpoint: it's a perl module that generates nice PDF presentations from an xml file...

  2. Re:Is this unique? by Draoi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not that I'm aware of. However, there's nothing to stop you importing an existing .ppt file into Keynote & barfing it back out as the now-published xml file. Instant Powerpoint standardiser ... :-)

    --
    Alison

    "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein

  3. Re:Is this unique? by d-Orb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Absolutely! Now, if only we could have the same for Word (for Excel, gnumeric/OOo work quite well), that'll be it!

  4. Re:Is this unique? by dthable · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How does the export work? I've been thinking about ditching PowerPoint but I don't want to export for PPT only to find out I need more tweaking to make it look decent again.

  5. Re:Is this unique? by tbmaddux · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The improt routine of KeyNote is not even close to being perfect. Every time I import one of the PPt presentations from work to use on my Mac, I spent 20 minutes cleaning things up.
    You say from "work" to your "Mac." Are you using Windows at work? I ask because I have noticed the same thing going Mac PowerPoint (any version from 98 to X) to/from Windows PowerPoint (any version from 97 to XP). Particularly with the way animations in the page were set up, and of course Windows Powerpoint doesn't have the sweet Quicktime transitions (that's right, Mac PowerPoint looks better).

    Anyhow, for that reason it might not be Keynote's fault at all, since they probably tested to get it to work like Mac PowerPoint.

    --
    Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
  6. Re:Don't replace AppleWorks... by PetWolverine · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...replace Office. AppleWorks is a very different application from the various Offices, being far more integrated as one application. Hopefully Apple will either update AppleWorks to where it can compete in features with Office, while keeping the existing paradigm, or if they create several new applications as you suggested, those new apps will replace not AppleWorks, but Office. It would be nice, for those of us who like the power of Office, to have an Apple product available so we could avoid endorsing Macrosquash any more than possible, but for people who prefer the integration of AppleWorks, that product's death would be very unfortunate.

    --
    I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.