09
What? Hidden strokes too?
Posted by | Posted in Hacks, Tips | Posted on 08-09-2007
Yes Keynote fans, it appears that Apple hid 5 more fancy stroke patterns from us too. If you read yesterday’s story and look at the FIRST frame in the pop-up menu, it looks like any other frame. If you choose it inside Keynote though, you’ll see that instead of a scale slider, it actually has a normal size and color changer, just like any other stroke. Who knew?

Anyway, there’s a sister file to the frames list file I mentioned yesterday (in the same location) called “BGGraphicInspectorSmartStrokes.plist” which controls the list of smart strokes. If you add the missing 5, you get a total of 6 size and color changeable strokes in your list (and it works WITH yesterday’s hack, at least on my 20″ screen).
Just so you don’t have to patch this yourself, We’ve provided a patched file for you.
Despite all the still missing features in Keynote, this hacking for hidden stuff is really fun!






Those are basically the same as the ones introduced in iWeb ’06. Sadly you cannot just copy and paste them into Keynote to use them. I’m still trying to see if you can reference them in an unaltered file for Pages, liike the Photo Frames, or if you have to modify that program as well.
Hopefully it’s just a matter of copying and pasting the styles. This does kind of show, though, that iwork and iweb are diverging from their similarities, which is too bad. I would like to have seen them develop the ‘layout library’ in a similar fashion to the ‘core library’ or ‘image library’.
Like the frames in your previous post, once you have turned on these functions in your own Keynote program and used them, you can incorporate them into a design or theme and when you share them, anyone with iwork’08 will be able to use them.
They are especially interesting when you use them with shapes created with SVG2Key. And they can be used as image masks using those same shapes. An awesome addition to any designers arsenal in all three programs.
I don’t know what to do with the patch after it is downloaded??
read the previous story to get the instructions. This is part 2.
Note that your modified plist file is missing a “
Bah… comment form doesn’t seem to handle less-than signs.
Maybe this’ll work: It’s missing a < in the second string line.
thanks! I fixed it.
I love having the new frames to use! One question… When I added the new strokes to the frames described on the previous post, I can’t see all of them because they go up under the menu bar like the problem with too many themes. Any work around?
yes, see the previous post, there’s no “fix” but the work around is to use the less of the frames, which is why I posted a file that only used 50 or so frames.
thanks for this!!!
Hi. I seems that Apple has hidden some transitions, too. I don’t know how to reactivate them but I’m missing some of the old transitions from Keynote 06. But when I open a Keynote 06 file they are all there in the drop down field. Amazing. Maybe you can hack this? Maybe we get some amazing new transitions as well? Greetings, Leonardo
Actually, they did this with 06 too. Go to the Keynote prefs, there’s a check box there to turn on the obsolete transitions. They’ll all show up in your list then.
I added frames the way the 1st article explained, and I can immediately see more frame options available to me, great! But this second article on how to add strokes… maybe I’m missing something, but I dont’ see any difference in options when I switch out the strokes file. Where exactly am I supposed to see more stroke options?
The strokes show up at the TOP of the grid of frames. The only big difference you’ll notice is that they can be re-colored.
For these I say thank you.
I can confirm that this also works for iWork ’09! Thanks Brian!!
Hi, Brian.
Don’t know if you’re still posting here, but maybe this question will inspire you. I’ve noticed in converted PPT files two customizations I can’t find in Keynote.
1. Customized bullets. You can type in any character in the Text Bullet cell, but how do you change the font so other cool ZD or Symbol characters will show up?
2. How do you add divider slides to the Navigation view? I just imported a PPT and there are two there; they are slides but appear as dividers in the Navigation view.
Thanx!
Ron