I'm sorry to say this looks to be true. I can't get it to work under Snow Leopard. Such a pity, it was so useful. Now I'm faced with a much bigger job preparing my lecture recordings.

That's a fair question. ProfCast still adds important value to Keynote 4.0 (iWorks '08) however. Keynote 4 does not incorporate the slide titles and automatically generate intelligent chapter markers. You would need to go back manually and add descriptive chapter titles for your slides without ProfCast.

That's not to mention those who are unfortunately stuck with Keynote 2, Keynote 3, or worse, Powerpoint.

Dave

Oki doki. Thanks for letting me know.

Btw, are you working on adding support for video? If possible, it would be way cool.

An important difference between Keynote's audio recording and exporting ability and ProfCast's is that the former produces video with an audio soundtrack while the latter produces an enhanced podcast, which is to say an audio track with integrated still images. Although enhanced podcasts don't record slide transitions the file sizes are much more compact without sacrificing visual information. Each slide becomes its own chapter, taking the title from the slide title, which makes navigation of large recordings a lot easier. Students love this feature because they can easily jump to the portion of a lecture that they want to revise.

Moreover enhanced podcasts will play on a greater variety of players (iPods and the like) which makes them more accessible to a larger audience.

If you don't need to record actual video ProfCast recording are a great balance of quality and file size.

ProfCast does seem a little unstable and occasionally unreliable but the developers are responsive and sincere in their efforts to help.

Most universities are still windows-centric and so we use Powerpoint, and to be honest I find Powerpoint to be far superior for science and technology presentations that Keynote. Apple has clearly not targeted the science community with its iWork package because it lacks any ability to generate equations, and any ability to present graphs with line fits and regression lines.

Couple that with the fact that Keynote's audio output to files is so full of bugs you cannot even create an audio slideshow most of the time. I am not sure what Apple was thinking when they added this feature and did not check that it worked, but their response has been lacking for some time now.

So, YES, profcast is still needed.

Hi,
The 160 X 160 limitation is one that exists as a result of the underlying framework we are using. We are working on rewriting the framework to eliminate the restriction, but for now, the default size is 160 X 160.

The demonstration version is fully featured and functional. We really want you to experience using ProfCast before you purchase it! (We allow 5 full uses before requiring a registration!) Please let us know if you have any other questions or feedback!

David Chmura
profcast.com