I like Symphony, but...
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I'm sure I'm not alone in the fact that right now, I'm reviewing and prepping my presentations for Lotusphere. 3 of them this time, and one (the show'n'tell) is a right bugger to test! Anyway, I was listening to the Taking Notes Podcast with John Head the other day about Lotus Symphony and some possible new releases. Having been working with Presentation for a while I hope they are sooner rather than later!
Lotus Symphony Documents and Spreadsheets I really like on the Mac. They might be slower to load than Pages or Numbers (wierdly), but they do have a boat load more functionality in there. Very nice. Presentation, on the other hand, is it's poor long lost cousin. If you're a presentation junkie like I am, it's missing some major features that Keynote has. Particularly:
- No ability to replace slide designs with a new template (John mentioned this)
- No auto-guidelines. Hard to explain this, but Keynote pops up automatic guidelines to register graphics on a centerline, baseline, a repeated distance form another object etc. Very, VERY handy
- Lots of publically available (and good) templates. Like those from www.Keynotepro.com
- Editing of slides in Notes view
And here's the biggie - no presenter display!! When you're looking at my slides from my Mac - this is what I see on my laptop (taken with the onboard screenshotting tool):
The top green bar tells me that the next slide is rendered and I can move onto it (useful if there are complex builds or animations), I can see the next slide coming up (useful for 'which brings me onto...') and I can easily see how far through the time allotted I am. Even better - I can pull this up on my laptop just to rehearse. I realised this afternoon that I'm so used to having this available to rehearse timing's that I find it really, really hard to work without it.
Now, I know that alot of this is available in MS Office. An I know that there are also a huge bunch of other features that make Macs better presentation machines (auto-display sensing that works, re-scaling of content, custom screen sizes, PDF/EPS manipulation, integration with iTunes, iPhoto etc etc). But it's this display that is the total Symphony killer for me. These sort of features let me write a 5 min presentation in 2mins flat - and present it from scratch (which I have done at certain conferences
)
BTW, as A/V guy at ILUG and UKLUG, I have never had problems connecting a Mac. The same cannot be said for the herd of Thinkpads (very good), Toshibas (OK), Vaios (bad), weird Acer laptops (truly awful) we've been presented with. And did you know when presenting, Keynote suppresses all other apps' dialog boxes and sounds? Nice, eh?
So, if you're wondering why so many Lotus presenters have gone Mac*, this is one of the reasons. It really is better, trust me. Of course, for Lotusphere we've all submitted our slides as ODF using Lotus Symphony, but I'm really hoping that soon we'll see a version of Symphony that closes up this gap soon and it's possible to use Symphony for every event.
*Of course, one of the other reasons is that most Notes professionals live in Notes, doc stores, have dbs for everything, Quickrs, Sameteim, don't print hard copy etc etc - and have no use for a Windows file server anymore so who cares what OS we use? I've given up trying to explain this to a Windows admin though. They'll get there one day though, I'm sure
Bookmark :
I'm sure I'm not alone in the fact that right now, I'm reviewing and prepping my presentations for Lotusphere. 3 of them this time, and one (the show'n'tell) is a right bugger to test! Anyway, I was listening to the Taking Notes Podcast with John Head the other day about Lotus Symphony and some possible new releases. Having been working with Presentation for a while I hope they are sooner rather than later!
Lotus Symphony Documents and Spreadsheets I really like on the Mac. They might be slower to load than Pages or Numbers (wierdly), but they do have a boat load more functionality in there. Very nice. Presentation, on the other hand, is it's poor long lost cousin. If you're a presentation junkie like I am, it's missing some major features that Keynote has. Particularly:
- No ability to replace slide designs with a new template (John mentioned this)
- No auto-guidelines. Hard to explain this, but Keynote pops up automatic guidelines to register graphics on a centerline, baseline, a repeated distance form another object etc. Very, VERY handy
- Lots of publically available (and good) templates. Like those from www.Keynotepro.com
- Editing of slides in Notes view
And here's the biggie - no presenter display!! When you're looking at my slides from my Mac - this is what I see on my laptop (taken with the onboard screenshotting tool):
The top green bar tells me that the next slide is rendered and I can move onto it (useful if there are complex builds or animations), I can see the next slide coming up (useful for 'which brings me onto...') and I can easily see how far through the time allotted I am. Even better - I can pull this up on my laptop just to rehearse. I realised this afternoon that I'm so used to having this available to rehearse timing's that I find it really, really hard to work without it.
Now, I know that alot of this is available in MS Office. An I know that there are also a huge bunch of other features that make Macs better presentation machines (auto-display sensing that works, re-scaling of content, custom screen sizes, PDF/EPS manipulation, integration with iTunes, iPhoto etc etc). But it's this display that is the total Symphony killer for me. These sort of features let me write a 5 min presentation in 2mins flat - and present it from scratch (which I have done at certain conferences
)
BTW, as A/V guy at ILUG and UKLUG, I have never had problems connecting a Mac. The same cannot be said for the herd of Thinkpads (very good), Toshibas (OK), Vaios (bad), weird Acer laptops (truly awful) we've been presented with. And did you know when presenting, Keynote suppresses all other apps' dialog boxes and sounds? Nice, eh?
So, if you're wondering why so many Lotus presenters have gone Mac*, this is one of the reasons. It really is better, trust me. Of course, for Lotusphere we've all submitted our slides as ODF using Lotus Symphony, but I'm really hoping that soon we'll see a version of Symphony that closes up this gap soon and it's possible to use Symphony for every event.
*Of course, one of the other reasons is that most Notes professionals live in Notes, doc stores, have dbs for everything, Quickrs, Sameteim, don't print hard copy etc etc - and have no use for a Windows file server anymore so who cares what OS we use? I've given up trying to explain this to a Windows admin though. They'll get there one day though, I'm sure
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Comments
Posted by John Head At 21:39:43 On 11/01/2010 | - Website - |
Posted by Rob Novak At 06:21:23 On 12/01/2010 | - Website - |