February 23, 2009

Editing images, photos or jpegs in Apple’s Keynote ’09 presentation software is an easy process, which no longer requires you to crop the photo or image in iPhoto. This is thanks to a new feature called “Mask.”

Simply place your photo on a Keynote slide, then click the Mask button, located slightly to the right of center in your browser. A square portion of your image will be zeroed in on, while the rest shades out. If you want to make the square portion smaller or bigger, you simply click on the edge of the image and drag it inward or outward until the mask is the size you want.

A mask slider will appear below the image, which allows you to zoom in or out on the image. If zooming in on the image moves the critical piece out of center, you can easily move the portion you want showing until it’s in the window.

Once you are done editing your photo, click “edit mask” again. The Mask portion of the image disappears, leaving you with a perfectly cropped image.

If you want to retouch your photo, there are several ways to do so. One is by doing it in iPhoto. For those who are willing to pay for a photo retouching software, Adobe Photoshop is considered the industry standard.

Another free alternative retouching tool is GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, which is similar to the MS Paint program PC users may be familiar with.

February 22, 2009

The first of a series of Presentation Camps kicks off this Saturday in Palo Alto, Calif. It’s an ad-hoc gathering of people passionate about presentations, created and hosted by Slideshare.net. Presentation Camp is a participatory conference, where those who plan to attend are free to submit their own ideas for a workshop to the organizers, then show up and share their best practices with their fellow attendees. In the BarCamp fashion, all who attend, are invited to host a session.

Proposed sessions so far include:

Time: Camp will run from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 pm, Saturday, Feb. 28. The agenda will be decided between 9:30 – 10 a.m. that day.
Location: Stanford University, Cordura Hall 100
Fee: Tickets are $10. You can register through TicketLeap.

Future Camps: Presentation Camp San Francisco is slated for March 21. Others are being planned for Seattle, New York, Washington DC, London and Kansas City.

February 15, 2009

Converting a PowerPoint presentation for a Mac so that you can take advantage of Apple’s sleek design and features of Keynote ’09 is easier than ever. All it takes is dragging and dropping the PowerPoint file onto the Keynote icon on your Mac desktop. The presentation file then opens in Keynote. (Keynote ’09, is an application that is part of iWork ’09, released last month.)

Conversely, if you’ve designed your slide deck in Keynote and will be one of a series of presenters (at a seminar, for example) who will all be using the same PC, no problem. It’s simple to convert your Keynote presentation into PowerPoint. The easiest of two ways to do this is by email. In the “Share” menu at the top of your Mac browser, select “Send via Mail,” then choose the format (Keynote, PowerPoint, or pdf). Keynote then launches the Mail program with the document already attached.

The second way is to go to the File menu in Keynote and select “Save As.” In the popup window that appears, check the box that says “Save Copy As,” then make sure “PowerPoint presentation” is selected. Then Click Save.

February 2, 2009

About a month ago, I wrote a post about 4 conferences where you can see great presentations (either live or archived on their sites). I just came across a slide deck on slideshare.net that lists three of the four conferences I noted, plus six others. One, of course, is TED, which kicks off tomorrow, in Southern California.