I purchased a copy of Apple’s Keynote for the iPad today.
Before you get too excited, I honestly believed that I have a legitimate, ok, legitimate enough, excuse to drop $9.99 for the touch-based presentation software: working while on the go.
Ok, I can hear a number of you yelling “Foul!” on that one. But look at it from my perspective. I’ve been getting a lot of information technology research notes from the likes of Gartner, Forrester, and Info-Tech. Most of the research I’ve been asked to read has been in the form of PowerPoint slides (either in native PowerPoint format or as Adobe Acrobat documents). The slides are usually printed and handed to me. Aside from not wanting to be tangentially responsible for the mowing down the rain forest, if I had the slides in electronic form I can read them while I’m walking around the house or waiting for the kids to finish their various sports practices. Makes perfect sense.
When slides showed up on my desk today for Microsoft Office 2010, I asked for the electronic version and then pulled out my iPad and purchased Keynote. So far, the slides have been easy to read on the iPad’s amazing screen and I’ve started reading the report. Hopefully this will allow me to get some more work done, raise the geek bar slightly, and still justify the $10 as a business related expense.
You can purchase Keynote 1.1 for the iPad from the Apple iTunes App Store. Starting today, owners of Keynote 1.0 for the iPad can download a free update to Keynote 1.1 for iPad.