#knpinside

The latest generation of Pages – Pages 7 – arrived in March, further refining the latest generation of Apple's signature publishing app and continuing the Second-Era evolution that began with the launch of Pages 5. As we noted in our latest Upgrade Report, Pages 7 adopted a number of exciting new features this generation – and we're now pleased to announce the release of our first wave of updates tailored especially for the latest architectural & workflow revisions that came along with the Pages 7 release.

As we first hinted at in our Upgrade Report, the re-introduction of Page Masters is something of a seismic shift in the Template Architecture landscape, offering major improvements to authoring workflow & ease-of-use, particularly when it comes to mobile authoring & complex document types like Brochures or Newsletters. Longtime or even casual users of Keynote will find the process of constructing & editing a Page Layout document very familiar now, and Pages '09 authors will finally feel right at home in the transition back toward a more Constructive authoring paradigm.

In many ways, Pages 7 is the long-awaited true successor to Pages '09: the core workflow that made Pages such a joy to use in the first place is not just back – it's better than ever before. If you're new to Pages since version 5.x, you're going to be in for a real treat when you settle into the new workflow. But if you're one of the surprising number of Pages '09 holdouts we've heard from over the last year while we've worked to forge a way forward from the Classic-Era Pages model, Pages 7.x is the proverbial droid you've been looking for.

There are a number of big evolutions happening at KeynotePro in 2017. And while some of the biggest changes won't be seen until a little later this year, the quick take off of our new Disruptor theme gave us the perfect opportunity to preview some of the ways we're going to be making our theme library even more flexible in 2017 and beyond.

While these new Add-Ons are only available for the Disruptor theme at the moment, in the coming weeks and months we'll be extending these kinds of updates to our entire NXT-gen theme catalog, providing even more options for the themes you're already using and making it easier to kick-start your next presentation regardless of which theme you're starting with.

Keynote 7.1 makes it easy to post interactive presentations on WordPress, Medium and the web - but be mindful of how much you're actually sharing.

The Keynote 7.1 Update brought an interesting new feature to Apple's presentation app: the ability to Post Interactive Presentations to WordPress, Medium and the web. We touched on this briefly in our Keynote 7.1 Upgrade Report, and while the new service still has a few bugs to work out and may not be for everyone yet, there's already a lot of buzz building around the web from authors anxious to explore an easy alternative to SlideShare and other online slide-hosting services.

Apple's made it very easy - though not entirely intuitive - to share your presentations with this new feature. But you'll want to be mindful of how much you're actually sharing with this service at the moment: there are a few non-obvious Privacy/Security concerns with the current implementation that are worth noting before you rush to try this out, particularly for business presenters.

Master the Keynote Style Palettes to Quickly Change Color, Type or Effects in Presentations Created With Our NXT-Gen Themes.

Thanks to the Style Palettes introduced in Keynote 6, it's never been easier to transform one of our themes from it's stock state to a more unique blend of color, type or effects more suited to your own personal tastes. If you have specific brand guidelines you need to match on a day-to-day basis, making a theme-wide change to fit specific color or type specifications is a significantly easier process in Keynote 6/7 than was ever possible in the classic '08/'09 architecture.

One of the questions we get most frequently these days is whether or not these "old '08/'09 Themes" we produce continue to work in the latest + greatest versions of Keynote or Pages.  It's a reasonable question - particularly if you're new to the applications via the Mac App Store, where no mention is made of the Suite name these days, let alone the Year that once signified the major edition of the suite. We've found folks to be genuinely surprised to realize they're running what amounts to a five-year-old app, and that those "old" themes are still very much current.

Yet here we are, some five full years after the last major-version release of the latest iWork suite.  That's not to say that things have remained the same, by any means - Keynote, Pages and Numbers are now available individually, on multiple platforms/devices, and now have moved into Beta for cross-platform cloud functionality.  The changes have been subtle along the way, and while the desktop apps have grown long in the tooth in a lot of ways over the intervening years, they're remained reliably stable through three major OS iterations (more, if you include iOS), and have added the necessary features and functionality to enable the suite to keep pace with itself on those multiple fronts at each step.

There have been plenty of rumors, these last couple of years in particular, that we'd see a new major-version release any time now - most recently Apple themselves, if you read their iWork for iCloud statements from this year's WWDC in a particular (generous) light.  But it remains to be seen exactly when we'll see any major core changes for the productivity apps beyond their already-engaged transitions to mobile devices and the cloud. Until Apple unveil a new major-version release it remains firmly in the realm of rumor and speculation, and we don't especially like to engage in either.

We adopted the Year-based nomenclature for updates on our theme library in 2005/2006 during the iWork '06 transition, thinking it would help to dispel any confusion as to which version of the application was required for a particular theme. And that worked wonderfully for a while - making it easy for us to iterate the theme library right alongside iWork's updates when we needed to, particularly during the '08 transition when the theme model architecture changed radically between versions and we needed to overhaul nearly the entire library.

But in 2013, five years after that last major-version release, when Apple themselves are no longer referring to the apps by Year (outside of the About box in the apps), the logic of continuing on that path seems highly questionable. Just a couple of years back, when we updated our Platform themes to the '09 architecture as Platform '09, we received more than a few emails wondering why we were building for an older app, from people reasonably assuming it was (then) 2011 and we'd certainly moved on to the (imagined) latest version by now.  That sense has only multiplied since then, judging by the emails we continue to get to this day about these "old '08/'09 themes" of ours.   

We've been holding off on any major-version iterations of our themes since Platform '09, hoping those "any day now" rumors about an updated iWork would eventually bear fruit and we'd be able to roll each of our house styles forward right alongside sans confusion.  But at some point we're going to need to update our library whether Apple's moved forward or not - what's long in the tooth for a productivity application is almost doubly so for the theme designs used in them.  Our build standards evolve, our tastes change and grow, and our themes should continue moving right along with them regardless. Application stability's great to a point, but at another point it also becomes a bit of a cage.

We're not entirely sure what's coming next for naming as of yet - save the upcoming anniversary reboot of one of our most well-known themes.  And Apple may yet surprise us with a whole new generation of the iWork apps in the coming months, with a new naming nomenclature of their own that we'd be hard-pressed not to at least consider adopting.  

We've given up the ghost on the old KeynotePro Blog site, and we're moving this entire section of our site to Tumblr.com.  If you're seeing this, you're already being forwarded as part of the changeover - welcome to the new digs.

The change has been a long time coming - very nearly from day one, actually.  While it all seemed very promising when we launched the blog alongside the site updates in 2009, we soon discovered just how inflexible the engine was in terms of how we wanted to incorporate a blog into our operations in a practical sense.  An onerous publication process for casual publishing, paired with an almost instantaneous avalanche of automated link-spam comment submissions to sort through on a daily basis quickly made the blog a headache no one in the studio wanted to deal with.  And as it aged, the engine's tendency to need constant tweaks alongside the server's ongoing security updates pushed it from a practical annoyance to an actual liability amongst otherwise stable, reliable services: just last week, we had to forgo a post profiling our new iOS Quick-Launch features at the last minute because - surprise - a security update had rendered the blog once again unable to process submissions.

And so, enough being enough, it was high time we reclaimed this section of the site from the technical corner we'd inadvertently painted ourselves into all those years ago: time to crumple the page and start with a clean sheet.

While Tumblr is often thought of as an "other" compared to traditional blog sites, it's actually uniquely well-suited for what we want in a blog. It's visually oriented, a snap for us to publish to from wherever we are and, perhaps most importantly, a service we actually use and enjoy in our personal lives - making the process of keeping the blog current a bit more fun and less wearisome all around.  It's a natural fit. 

If you're already a Tumblr user, you've probably already noticed the ubiquitous follow button up top + we humbly implore you to click it and tag along. If not, do yourself a favor and click the tumblr icon up top to start exploring one of the most interesting, creative-centric networks you'll find anywhere online.