My most recent excitement has come from the most recent Apple software updates:
- Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks
- iOS 7
- iWork – specifically Keynote 6
I’ve not had much time with Mavericks as yet. I’ve installed it on a test laptop and it seems about par for the course for a .0 release of OS X – interesting but with some rough edges. I give it a week or so until 10.9.1 pops out. I’ve not seen anything mindblowingly awesome so far, but have found a few glitches. I’m keeping track of these on my wiki page.
For those interested, Ars Technica has a thorough analysis of Mavericks.
I installed iOS 7 on my work iPad Mini last week. It seems mostly OK though I’m not enamoured with the new look icons. The recent update to 7.03 means that one can remove not only the parallax effect, but also remove the folder closing animations. Thankfully they didn’t make me feel ill, but I did think they were a waste of time. I have not yet been inclined to install on my iPhone or home iPad but I’ll probably come around in time.
A big part of the Mavericks launch was the announcement that iWork will be free with all new Macs and iOS devices. I’m a big fan of Keynote, the presentations app in iWork, and use it instead of Powerpoint as it does things that make Powerpoint fall over in a sobbing heap. Sadly the update removes quite a few features in the name of parity between the Mac and iOS releases. One I use quite a bit is the option to embed a web page in a presentation which can be dynamically updated when the slide shows. Apple removed this from the main user interface a while ago, but existing embeds worked just fine and could be edited & copied to new presentations. Sadly Keynote 6 opens the presentation, converts the website with a static image, and then autosaves the file to the new Keynote 6 format overwriting your old file unless you cancel the import. All in all quite vexing.
This has set me thinking about how to replace that functionality. PowerPoint doesn’t do it either – you can link to a site, but that’s no use on a display board. So I’m looking at various HTML5 display frameworks which let you write a presentation with HTML and CSS. Several look impressive, so over the next few weeks I’ll be trying out a few, such as
After all, if most of the content you’re displaying is text, images, and web pages, what’s better than HTML to wrap it all up?