I've just spent three days anchored to my desk preparing a submission while keeping other tasks ticking over in background. The submission demanded inclusion of a 3 minute marketing pitch, not something I would normally volunteer but which didn't frighten me too much as I've done a bit, separately, with iMovie and Keynote in recent years.

This time I made what turned out to be a false start in iMovie before deciding that the base documents I had pulled together weren't really suited to that direction. Keynote proved much better and I soon had 23 slides prepared including 3 which utilised different transitions to move focus within the same base document, and which would not survive export to the dreaded PowerPoint.

Faced with that obstacle, export as a QuickTime movie needed to be the next option and a quick test of Keynote's Record option was encouraging. So with the slides complete and the rest of the submission text ready to upload, I hit Record for the second time ever and started speaking, only using the pause button a couple of times as my other hand advanced the slides. While I do have an external mike attached to the computer it was left switched off and can now clearly be repurposed. The immediate outcome was a 4:35 movie with enough pauses (and waffle in lieu) that I could quickly trim out to get it to 3:11 without losing anything.

I also notice that Keynote has a Rehearse option but that will have to wait for my next excuse. At one level it is sad to have had to move away from the in many ways wonderful S5 tool for doing slideshows in HTML but building in Keynote is not just quicker but also more amenable to trying new design ideas. Hopefully Apple's commitment to HTML5 will eventually translate into Keynote export to web and paper over that crack. Keynote is amongst the 60% of my litmus test iPad Apps that have already been delivered, although that still isn't going to bring forward that acquisition schedule.