Progress Report of November 9, 2012 | Part Two of Two
What's Possible By Prototyping With Apple Keynote
Apple Keynote is the software that Steve Jobs had Apple's engineers first build for him to make his now famous new product announcements for Apple iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad and iCloud. As a presentation-making tool, Mr. Jobs did not want to use Microsoft PowerPoint for announcing his new products!
Amir Khella, creator of Keynotopia prototyping templates, is advocating use of Apple Keynote as a prototyping tool for designing user interfaces and prototypes instead of its traditional use of making presentations. With Apple Keynote and Keynotopia, each slide functions as a user interface (UI) screen.
In July 2008 in fact, I personally used Apple Keynote as a software tool to design-and-make the following promotional postcards that I uploaded to Vistaprint.com for printing. In this use case, the postcards only cost $100 USD to have 1,000 made to promote a business I owned and operated.
What's Possible By Prototyping With Apple Keynote
Apple Keynote is the software that Steve Jobs had Apple's engineers first build for him to make his now famous new product announcements for Apple iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad and iCloud. As a presentation-making tool, Mr. Jobs did not want to use Microsoft PowerPoint for announcing his new products!
Amir Khella, creator of Keynotopia prototyping templates, is advocating use of Apple Keynote as a prototyping tool for designing user interfaces and prototypes instead of its traditional use of making presentations. With Apple Keynote and Keynotopia, each slide functions as a user interface (UI) screen.
In July 2008 in fact, I personally used Apple Keynote as a software tool to design-and-make the following promotional postcards that I uploaded to Vistaprint.com for printing. In this use case, the postcards only cost $100 USD to have 1,000 made to promote a business I owned and operated.
In Keynote, you can think of a presentation slide as a user interface (UI) screen.
- Keynote has just the right amount of features to do wireframing and not get bogged down in the complexity of the tool itself.
- Shapes -- Keynote provides a dozen shapes for use in designing prototypes.
- It has a very nice feature of typing a BUTTON LABEL inside of a round-edged rectangular shape. It can apply shape styles very quickly.
- Groupings and Locking are helpful in keeping software protoypes static or in applying interface changes throughout a functional prototype.
- Duplicating a slide helps create an alternate prototype screen to present to the client as another way for a screen to look.
- Master slides are very useful -- for making changes across multiple slides -- on one slide.
- Tables can be used to create Tabs, toolbars and command bars.
- Hyperlinks can be used to make prototype interactivity in the user interface itself.
- Animations, via Slide Transitions, animates BETWEEN slides.
- Animations, via Builds, animates objects INSIDE slides.
- Comments are useful for putting "sticky notes" on the slide objects for your software developer(s) to know what to program into the final product, but don't actually display in the functional prototype!