Keynote Presentation in portrait mode for wireframing iPhone apps

It would be nice if Keynote supported portrait mode. Also I wish it enables to play mov file after exporting. In a meanwhile, you can do this:

1) export your keynote file to mov (quicktime);

2) Buy an iPhone app called Zoom Player. There is a Free version, so try that first.

3) You can play the mov file with Zoom player in a vertical mode.

This is not perfect, but you may be able to show some actions to your client.

Keynote does support a portrait mode. One way of changing the dimensions of the slides is from

Inspector > Document > slide size > set custom slide size.

From there, you can set the width and height to anything you want.

Edward, the discussion is with regards to iPhone version of Keynote. Does it play vertically if slide size is set in 640x960?

I made up this prototype tool with Keynote. Please let me know if this is useful for someone like ourselves who develop mockups/prototypes for iOS.

http://keynotemockups.com/home.html

I found that exporting to PDF is best and open it with Adobe PDF reader for iOS. See this video from my site:

http://keynotemockups.com/tour.html

I've had some success by doing the following:

1- I finish my screen design in portrait mode (640x960) and group all the elements.

2- I create a new presentation and make the slides on landscape mode (960x640)

3- I copy each screen group into the new landscape mode slide and then rotate it 90degrees counter clockwise with the inspector

4- I then ungroup and add hyperlinks and animations.

5 - Sync the file with Itunes

If you don't mind working with your screens rotated this might do the job.

Cheers!

Interactive pdfs are a nice workaround, but regular adobe acrobat viewer is non-ideal for this purpose, here is a better solution if you want to go down this road– it's a pdf viewer which is only navigable through hotlinks, so there is no viewer interface to pop up and spoil the experience.

http://link-viewer.maxmondon.de/

Thanks a ton for this info!

going down the same path as others on the thread here. there are a couple of other things to look at - keynotopia and pop are both solutions that support rendering a clickable PDF on the iphone. a couple of problems with these for me:

1) neither support iphone 5 resolution - they are both iphone 4. i want to do assets 640x1136

2) neither support inline .mov's

3) netiher support the library of transitions and motions from keynote

keynote feels like the right solution for this and i'm willing to work around the landscape/portrait limitation, but when i did a custom deck that was 1136x640 keynote on the iphone 5 resized it and showed it much smaller

does anyone know the "native" or maximum rendering resolution of keynote on iphone?

thanks

One issue I have found using this method is that after rotating the mock-up screens counter-clockwise, all the text that is created in Keynote re-orients back clock-wise (i.e., becomes horizontal). I have tried changing the rotation degree but it does not seem to work. Any workarounds or suggestions?

Just recently on the WWDC 2014, there was a talk “Prototyping: fake it till you make it” where they actually showed desktop Keynote with a portrait mode presentation and then showed an iPhone displaying animations from that keynote in full screen portrait mode.

The presenter also says “we do this a lot in our team”. Either they are flat out lying or it must be somehow possible to change a setting somewhere.

Does anyone know which one it is?

joshTheGreenDragon wrote:

Just recently on the WWDC 2014, there was a talk “Prototyping: fake it till you make it” where they actually showed desktop Keynote with a portrait mode presentation and then showed an iPhone displaying animations from that keynote in full screen portrait mode.

I'm facing the same problem.

From that discussion, it appears that rotating all the content is the only way...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5514724

I was fascinated by the way, an app can be prototyped with Keynote from that WWDC14 talk. Now I have spend two hours AFTER finishing my mockup on desktop, just to realize, that I cannot show it in full screen on the iPhone (out of the box). I will try this grouping and rotation hint which will cost me another hour or so. 😟

I assume (and hope) that they used some kind of early iOS8 version of Keynote which will be available soon.

It got pretty old rotating everything manually, so I made a script to automatically do it. It's written using the new javascript scripting stuff so you'll need Yosemite to get it to work. Here it is:

https://gist.github.com/ericallam/a5cd76651c327b116a6e

Open the Script Editor and copy and paste that code into a new Javascript script. Then Export it as an application. You can then drag and drop keynote documents on the exported application and it will automatically resize the keynote document into landscape, and rotate and resize everything correctly. Then just ship the Keynote document over to Keynote for iPhone and it should work. I've used this script for the last couple of weeks, on multiple different prototypes, so it should hopefully work for your prototypes also. Let me know if you run into anything that needs to be fixed.

Unfortunately your javascript does not work on my keynote presentation, maybe because I have a chart in it which does not have the rotation option - nice try though.

I too was fascinated how an app can be prototyped with Keynote from that WWDC14 talk... So I bought Keynote for Mac and Keynote for iPhone... waste of money 😠