So I’m working on course materials for a class I’ll be teaching next week on Acceptance Test Driven Development.

I decided to try using Keynote on my trusty no-longer-all-that-new Mac instead of PowerPoint. I find PowerPoint on the Mac incredibly annoying. Whenever I want to edit a presentation on the Mac that I created on the PC (like, all of the presentations I have), I get Converting Metadata messages all over the place. When editing a 300 slide file, making even the smallest change can take forever. So, Keynote seemed like a better alternative.

Now I should explain that although most of my slide decks look reasonably simple, I tend to use a lot of animations for certain types of things - like bringing a workflow to life.

And I also use the presenter notes area as a place to put the meat of the materials for participants so that when I print books with both the slide and the presenter notes, there’s a good amount of text. The result are course notes that read kind of like a book with a whole lot of illustrations.So in other words, I am not your typical lightweight presentation software user. And I’ve crashed PowerPoint a lot as a result.

But I had high hopes for Keynote. For starters, it’s Mac software. Built for Macs. None of this ported over from Windows crap.

Alas, I was doomed to disappointment.

First, when I attempted to do some fiddly edits on the text under a page with a ton of animations, Keynote died a horrible death. It didn’t exactly freeze entirely, but I could no longer edit the content. I could attempt to save/export my file, but every time I did - no matter what format - it told me that the file was corrupt. Sadly, I’ve gotten out of the habit of saving every 30 seconds, so I lost a fair amount of work.

When I finally recovered everything an hour later, I vowed not to make the same mistake again. I not only started saving rabidly every 30 seconds, but I also checked everything into my subversion repository. However, when a subsequent commit failed with the message “Directory …/.svn containing working copy admin area is missing” I learned that there’s an interaction bug between Keynote and Subversion. I used the workaround kindly published by Daniel Sadilek (bless you, dude). And I was back in business. Annoyed, but back in business.

But here’s the thing. I’m already annoyed, and now I’m looking at my .key file for a 27 slide file, and it’s 3.8Mb. What??? I know I’m abusive to presentation software. I understand that my usage is a tad on the abnormal side. But 3.8Mb for 27 slides? Slides with graphic drawings and text, no photos, no movies, no sounds? That’s nuts. With a little experimentation I discovered that more than half that is due to two slides that make extensive use of animations. And I’m betting that those same animations had something to do with Keynote dying a horrible death when I tweaked the text underneath. Someday when I have more time I’ll see if I can reproduce the bug.

Let’s just say I’m re-evaluating my decision to use Keynote. PowerPoint is looking pretty good right now. Sigh.

And this is also a lesson re-learned about software testing: there’s nothing like a real user to find real problems. For Agile projects, that means automated unit and acceptance tests are necessary but not sufficient. Make sure real humans try the software under real world conditions. Given the topic of the course materials I was working on, this was a timely reminder…though a far more painful one than I really wanted.