A new major version of Mac OS X, version 10.7 dubbed Lion, is about to be released. I’ve gotten some questions about how Pear Note will work in Lion and I wanted to answer them here. First, let me say that Pear Note will continue functioning just as it does today on Snow Leopard when Lion ships with one exception (which I’ll get to shortly). So, feel free to upgrade away and don’t worry about losing Pear Note.
There are a bunch of new features in Lion that apps can take advantage of which many of you have asked about, including Resume, Auto Save and Versions, and Full Screen. While I would love for Pear Note to support some of these new features right away, they require some major reworking of Pear Note. So, Pear Note will continue working as it did on Snow Leopard and not use these features for a little while. Once I get the iOS version of Pear Note released, then I’ll look at incorporating some of these Lion features in.
Importing Keynote and Powerpoint slides
As I said above, there’s one thing that’s not going to keep working in Lion. The method I use to import Keynote and Powerpoint slides files does not work any more in Lion. The truth is, it never worked perfectly, and often had trouble with complicated presentations. So, Pear Note is dropping support for importing Powerpoint and Keynote files as of version 2.0.6 (just released). It will continue to work on Leopard and Snow Leopard as it has before, but it is being dropped as an official feature (meaning it won’t be advertised as a feature any more).
Don’t worry that you won’t be able to use the slides part of Pear Note any more, though. You just have to convert your slides to PDF using their respective applications before adding them to your Pear Note document. This is a much, much more reliable way of importing the slides, as Powerpoint is excellent at reading Powerpoint files and Keynote is excellent at reading Keynote files (it’s like they were made to do it). More detailed instructions on how to do this are available here.
Thanks for your understanding.
Dear Sir: I have no problem with going through pdf first. Frequently, in fact, the file we are supplied with at conferences are pdf and not powerpoint or keynote files. (Speakers like to distribute pdf instead of powerpoint or keynote files.) Quite often, however, multiple (usually 3, 4 or 6) slides with borders are combined into a single pdf page in a handout format. My question is whether Pear Note can extract each slide from a pdf page that contains 3-6 slides. If not, I would like to add this capability to the wish list for you to implement. Thank you.
No, I’m sorry but Pear Note cannot extract individual slides from a PDF containing multiple slides per page.
Today i tried the Lion version. On the start i was writing and recording just audio. I played it back and it was gorgeous. Then i decided to continue writing and record video. Now, the previous audio recording disappeared…video was fine:-(
Yannis,
What version of Pear Note are you using? There was a bug in the original 2.0.6 that was released to solve some Lion problems, which has subsequently been fixed in the 2.1 release.
Thanks for the quick reply. I am using 2.1 did you try to reproduce the problem?
Yes, I tried to reproduce it, but was unable to. It sounds exactly like the problem that was fixed in 2.1, so it’s odd that you’d be having it in 2.1. Can you look in system.log to see if there’s anything from Pear Note? Also, it’s probably best to not have this conversation in blog comments, so would you mind emailing what you find to bugs@usefulfruit.com where we can continue this?