The most interesting Mac-related news is that, for the first time, AAS presenters can use Macs (and Keynote) for presenting in oral sessions. They have Powerbooks with Parallels running OS X and Windows in every room, so people are free to use whatever OS and presentation software they want. Excellent idea. Hopefully this becomes standard practice for AAS. I grumbled about being forced to use Windows here some years ago, so it’s only fair I post again now that the situation has been improved.

On an unrelated note, I attended the NASA CAE workshop on improving the introductory astronomy class for non-majors, and it was excellent. There is a large body of research that lecture-only classes are ineffective for teaching non-science major courses, and so called “active learning” techniques are better. I’m convinced, and I think many people would benefit from the workshops so… find one near you and check it out.

In the past, I had tried to use Powerpoint. The problem with Powerpoint for posters is twofold. One, powerpoint is not geared for printing. It’s design for screen presentation. The concepts of inches and page and paper sizes are not particularly meaningful to it. The second, bigger, problem is that it rasterizes vector graphics such as PDFs and EPS files.

What is rasterizing you ask? It takes the vector format, which is infinitely scaleable, and turns it into a bitmapped graphic of a fixed resolution….

Here we have a PDF graphic and a TIFF graphic (exported from Preview from the PDF). They look the same, no? (To fit on this page I had to rescale the screen cap, so neither looks that great actually.

Oh wait! When we zoom in, it looks awful. The one on the left is resolutionless, it’s a vector description… the one on the right is bitmapped, it’s pixels – like it was scanned.

So I take PDFs or EPS files that look like the image on the left, plunk them into Powerpoint, and when it prints out in big poster size I get garbage like that on the right. Not just for logos, but for my graphs and such too.

It was with great joy I discovered that Keynote, Apple’s presentation program, understands PDFS, and doesn’t rasterize them. It treams them and prints them as vector graphics and they look great. The problem, however, was that Keynote still was a presentation program. It didn’t understand page sizes, it just understood screen sizes. It wasn’t ideal.

But this year, along came Pages – very similar to Keynote, but specifically for laying out … well … pages. It comes with some very nice templates for fliers, resums, newsletters. It’s tightly integrated with iPhoto so it’s easy to drop in pictures, etc.

But for the cause of poster making, posters for a scientific conference, it’s fabulous. It supports columns very easily. It supports vector PDFs. It allows a graphic to either move with text or stay affixed in a specific spot on the page … with or without word wrap. It’s great!

My only early concerns were that Pages can sometimes be slow, and this was hampering me when I tried to turn my old poster into a poster template for Pages. But I didn’t have that problem this time. I plan on making a Poster Template for pages available for download soon.

Meanwhile, check back for a PDF of my poster after the conference.

p>So, there was a post on Macintouch about Mac marginalization at physics conferences. The writer said everything had to be made for Powerpoint on a PC and he couldn’t use his Mac or Keynote. I figured surely astronomer’s are more enlightened – I mean Macs are everywhere at AAS. iBooks, Powerbooks. You can’t spit without hitting a Mac, so AAS must have a more mac-friendly policy, right?

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p>Wrong. This is the AAS policy:

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LCD Projectors and Computers will be provided in every oral session room, free of charge. YOU MAY NOT USE YOUR OWN. You do not need to place an order to use the LCD Projector, but the following requirements must be strictly adhered to:

PRESENTATION: PowerPoint or Adobe Acrobat are the required formats. Your PowerPoint presentation must be compatible with Office XP (2002) for the PC. The computers in the sessions rooms will be Windows XP Pro with Office XP.[my emphasis]

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p>Well, that’s just garbage. I understand they have lots of rooms and lots of speakers and want to standarize but Mac users must make up half of astronomer’s these days? Maybe 40%. Still, we’re huge as this popularity of this site indicates. Why must our presentations conform to ungodly Windows computers running Powerpoint? I use Keynote – not Powerpoint. Ugh.

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p>I think we need to make a stink. Who should we write? Who reading this is in the power structure at AAS? I know there are time constraints and delays associated with having people plugging in their own laptop but still. How about a Macintosh in each room with Office 2004 and Keynote? That would assuage 100% of users, wouldn’t it?