Media selection remains extremely laggy, even on a 2017 iMac. The image gallery feature lets you create slideshows that you can either advance manually or set a timed, automatic advance. For automatic playback, you can set the duration between images. For automatic or manual playback, you can set one of three kinds of builds through the images: Appear, Dissolve, and Move In. Creating a pseudo-slideshow through builds in version 7.3 was maddening now, it’s just a drag and drop process. You can preview this while setting it up, and then advance through the images while presenting or set it to run. Image galleries are the only new interactive feature, letting you insert and label images in a frame that can be paged through manually or as an auto-advance slideshow. That should reduce any friction as you work among apps and across platforms, even if nothing else has changed.

Also, there’s more consistency with tools and expectations across Keynote, Pages, and Numbers on both platforms. In Keynote 8, Apple added a small list of features that make it easier to move presentations between iOS and macOS. In version 7.2, navigation and marking up a document in text (with replies and threaded comments) became far better. It’s still weaker than other presentation apps, and I’ve spent hours moving items around to create the right flow-but at least now, it’s feasible. Version 7.1 offered up one of the most significant changes: an Object List that made creating complicated builds vastly easier, as selecting and ordering items in the build was a frustrating process that lead to literal head-to-desk slamming. Version 7.0 added a beta of collaborative real-time editing. Apple continued to push forward development through incremental releases from 7.0 to 7.3, which restored a number of features that we found lacking in 6.5.3. We haven’t reviewed Keynote since version 6.5.3 in 2015, so it’s worth a look of what’s changed since then.

The latest release for Mac brings it up to date with simultaneous releases of Keynote for iOS and Pages ( Mac and iOS) and Numbers.

Keynote 8 for Mac hasn’t reached the apex of its perfection, but Apple clearly didn’t have a wishlist of features to push it forward.

Download keynote version 8