Keynote Guidance

April 5th, 2008
Categories: Interaction, Interface, OS X

A few ideas to improve the alignment guides in Apple’s Keynote presentation software, based on version 4.0.3.

  1. Allow users to simultaneously create intersecting vertical and horizontal guides by dragging from the upper left corner between the rulers. This halves the number of drags needed to create a bounding box using guides.
    1. Click…
      Clicking at the vertical and horizontal ruler intersection
    2. …drag…
      Dragging the guides
    3. …release at desired position.
      Guides in desired position
  2. Consistent with the above, allow users to reposition existing intersecting guides simultaneously by dragging from the intersection. The current behavior seems to default to just the vertical guide.
  3. Allow users to copy and paste guides between slides using commands available in the Format menu and a contextual menu that appears when Control- or right-clicking on an individual ruler or in the upper left intersection of the two. The copying and pasting of guides would exist independent of the clipboard, similar to how styles are handled. Including a ruler unit selection sub-menu would make some sense.

    Ruler contextual menu
  4. Bind Control-Command-G to Show/Hide Guides; how to bind a shortcut to this menu command using System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts is not obvious since it has to be bound twice — the command label changes from Show Guides to Hide Guides. Thanks to Rob Griffiths of Mac OS X Hints for the information on how to bind a single shortcut to a dual-state menu command.
  5. Evaluate the colors of the slide canvas and objects to determine a highly visible and distinct color for guides. The default yellow is rather hard to see on a white canvas.

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