Rock On with Keynote

If any of you haven't heard me crow in utter admiration and evangelical urging about Apple's iWork component Keynote, you a.) haven't been paying attention or b.) haven't been within 20 feet of me lately. Seriously, Keynote is that perfect storm of an app: highly compatible with file formats coming in AND going out, simple to use, stable, powerful, starts off with a sense of taste and style that cuts your work in half out of the gate, and is cheap.*

But I recently ran into an issue just last night. I've promoted Keynote as the simplest way to throw together a Flash animation for the design-inclined. Seriously, anyone who defends Flash as being a design tool anymore should be forced to do anything good without ActionScript. Designers in the house, raise your hands and tell me how many of you have time to learn a programming language like ActionScript? How many of you even THINK in script? Yep, that's what I thought. Sure, there are some of you. You're probably also earning 2-3 times more than me right now. ;-)

Problem is, however, I tried setting the slide size of Keynote to a banner-like 120 pixels tall, and 500 wide (that's your first trick, by the way... you can set the slide size in Keynote in the inspector palette by using the "Other" option in the Slide Size drop down menu).

What's odd is that it wouldn't let you make a slide SMALLER than 200 pixels in any direction. This seemed totally bizarre to me. If Keynote would let you set a slide size to some arbitrary amount like 234x1782, then why would it decide to draw the line at 200 pixels? At first, I thought maybe since each theme comes with elements on the slides (like text boxes), there was a downward limit to how small the slide could be. So I decided to eliminate all elements, and all master slides except "Blank." Tried adjusting the size, and still no dice.

Onto the internet, and interestingly, even in the Apple discussion threads, it seemed like a lost cause. Even someone who's a regular on those Keynote threads said it wasn't possible, and everyone in the thread gave up. Then I though, well, since Keynote takes many cues from Motion, maybe that would export to Flash and let me do a canvas size of anything I wished. You'd figure for the price, it could do that.

And you, like me, would be oh so wrong.

But this just did not make any sense. The slide size is just a set of variables, right? Why would the limit be there, at 200 square? There has got to be a backdoor -- a way to force feed the dimensions to Keynote and make it take them, without me having to be come a programmer to do so.

Wait, what did I just say? I want to make an application do something that it doesn't want to through its UI, but seems possible, and is, let us not forget, an Apple application? And then it dawned on me...

Automator -- that little app with so much power (like Applescript) and a quirky interface. Wouldn't it have some, say, Automator actions inside it? A quick peek, and there are, including "Create new presentation" where you can ENTER DIMENSIONS BY HAND.

Oh yes folks, from what I can tell, I am the first person on the interweb to discover that you can shove dimensions like 128x128 down Keynote's throat via an Automator action and make it stick.

So have fun, tell your friends, give me credit, and, more importantly, send work my way. Um, paying work, preferably. ;-)

*It is one app of three comprising the $80 iWork suite of apps... how much of that $80 you say that Keynote actually 'costs' will depend upon your use of the other two apps, Pages and Numbers. I'm not much of a spreadsheet guy, but the latest version of Pages has made me forget almost entirely about Word and its ilk, so I'm going to call Keynote an even $40. Your mileage may vary.