KeyNEWS: What’s new in Keynote 9.0

Keynote 9.0 is the latest update for Apple Keynote which was released on April 3 with the MacOS. The last update with major improvements was approximately 1 year ago, Keynote 8.0. As in this update, the focus for the last 2 years is still iCloud integration and collaboration.

Here are three of the new functions with this update and how I think they are going to change the presentation game on Mac and iOS:

1. Add a shape to your shapes library

Now you can add customized shapes to your library. When you save a custom shape to your library, its path, flip, and rotation properties are saved. However, the size, color, opacity, and other properties aren’t.

This function can be very helpful for a shapeс that are specific to your brand guidelines. Especially if you use them often across your presentations.

When it is in your library, sharing and collaboration are so much easier by just sending a link to anyone. Having the shapes in your library allows you to use them across other Apple applications like Pages and Numbers as well. Even more, you can use your custom shapes in the same app on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. For example, if you add a shape in Keynote on your MacBook, you can use it in Keynote on your iPhone and all other devices. How cool is that!

How to save a shape to your library?

It is quite simple, really. Just control-click or right-click the shape and choose Save to My Shapes.

To have the shape in your iCloud library you need:

An iOS device with iOS 11.2 or later or a Mac with macOS 10.13.2 or later. Sign in to iCloud with the same Apple ID and turn on iCloud Drive on all your devices.

2. Sync themes with iCloud

Another cool and much-needed feature that came to Keynote is that now your themes are syncing to your iCloud. This means that you can have Keynote, Pages and Numbers files with the same font, colors, and style across all your devices. This again is useful for company presentations that need to have the brand look.

You don’t have to do anything special to turn this on.

Just make sure that you have the latest version of Pages, Numbers and Keynote installed and you are signed in iCloud with the same Apple ID and iCloud Drive is turned on.

3. Collaboration Improvements

Keynote collaboration in real-time is great but has some restrictions. One of them being a presentation in collaboration mode, in which you couldn’t edit objects in groups. Luckily, Apple is working more and more on this feature and now the groups are editable! Even more, there are some nice interface and performance improvements. Hurray!

Click here to learn more on collaboration in Keynote.

Unfortunately, there are still some features that aren’t supported when the presentation is in collaboration mode. Here at the bottom of the page, you can see a full list of them. It is now getting smaller and smaller.

I hope this was useful!

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Originally published at https://356labs.com on April 12, 2019.