Sunday, April 27, 2014

Keynote conversion: Phase 1 complete

As mentioned previously, I'm converting the curriculum material I've written over the years from Canvas documents to Keynote documents.

Just before 10pm last night, I completed Phase 1 of this project. All my Physics 1 documents are now converted. This was an important milestone to exactly me. The Phyz Springboard: Understanding Rainbows was the last to be rebuilt. All tolled, over 200 documents were reconstructed. Most were two pages, a few were only one, but many were three or more pages. I don't know exactly how many pages had to be rebuilt, and it's probably better that way.

Work has already begun on Phase 2: AP Physics B (now AP Physics 1 and 2). But there are miles to go before I sleep on that. Completing Phase 1 took the better part of two years. If all goes well, Phase 2 will be done sometime in 2016. I'll need my aging MacBook Pro (2008, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard) to hold up through then, since my newer MacBook Pro (2012, Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion) does not have Rosetta and so cannot open Canvas X.

The seaworthiness of my lifeboat, Apple's Keynote, has been cast into doubt by Apple's dramatic botching of Keynote 6. It appears that Apple really doesn't want to author software anymore. As a matter of pragmatism, I'll need for Apple to fix Keynote (unlikely), or at least allow for the continued operation of Keynote 5 for another 10 years (not likely). Both of those are tall orders.

Here's where the Canvas X to Keynote 5 stand now. (Green means a section is complete, orange means a section is down to a fewer than 4, yellow is fewer than 2.) (Also in the interim, California's 9-12 Physics CST has been discontinued and NGSS is being adopted. To wit, the unit on heat and thermo is no longer part of our first-year physics class.)









The punchline? After killing Canvas for Macintosh in 2007, ACD claims they are developing Canvas for Macintosh in 2014. At this point, I don't trust them, and I wouldn't put it past them to develop Canvas 15 for Mac as a app that either cannot open Canvas X documents or will scramble such documents upon opening them.

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