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Developer Issues

Both Pages 1.x and Keynote 2.x, which form the basis of Apple’s iWork package, are powerful, yet easy to use applications that have attracted large and ever-growing customer bases. The iWork package is part of a family of iApps productivity tools.

Because Keynote uses an open, easily accessible file format, developers can take advantage of its XML schema to enhance existing products or create new ones. Beginning with Keynote 1.x, it is possible to build applications that will create or change the contents of a Keynote presentation. For example, developers can use any of Keynote’s themes and build an entire presentation of their own design simply by filling out the <key:slide-list> element in a text editor of their choice.

The Keynote APXL file is the engine that drives every presentation, specifying every detail of the presentation’s appearance and behavior––from master slide and each individual slide to the transitions used between slides. The APXL file also defines the state of the presentation when the user first opens it. An understanding of how the elements in an APXL file combine to create a presentation is critical to developing applications that are robust and well-behaved.

Similarly, understanding the Pages document structure is important for Apple developers who want to customize their own page layouts or add value to their existing applications.

Important Changes to the File Format

When Apple introduced Keynote 2.x, a number of new features were added to the application. In so doing, the document file format was significantly expanded and revised.

For developers of existing applications that read and write the Keynote 1.x file format, this has necessitated updating their code to read and write the new Keynote 2.x format.

What this means is that Keynote 2.x will read existing Keynote 1.x files, so developers can continue creating documents in the older file format programmatically from their applications. However, the original file will be converted to the new format and overwritten when it is saved from within Keynote 2.x.

Note that the file type name of Keynote was changed from presentation.apxl in Keynote 1.x to index.apxl in Keynote 2.x.

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