It’s been while since I did a keynote talk… and even longer since I got my gimmick working to automatically tweet from my Apple Keynote slide deck (first done in 2011).
I’d pretty much shied away from slide decks, instead doing more talks lately direct from the web using my own SPLOTpoint or doing things like this with Reveal.js.
I got a ping last week from The Place That People Say is Crap and It Probably Is Yet Still Good Because Things Happen Like This:
@cogdog Hey Alan. I wanted to ask you a question about some code (I think) you wrote. Can I DM you?
— Amy Webb ? (@amywebb) October 16, 2017
Amy was asking about getting the Keynote autotweet to work in a modern MacOS.
My last working instructions are quite out of date, as apparently, in Apple Infinite Wisdom changed some of the capabiity on what AppleScript could do. Some of the comments indicated it was working in Yosemite, I did not have luck, and gave up (or forgot about it).
Counter to the idea that I am on the cutting edge, I am still using a rather old MacOS (Mavericks, OS X 10.9.5) on my primary machine. I heard of problems in newer systems, and I still like using Aperture for photo management (despite people implying the sky was falling when Apple announced end up updating, It Still Works). Since 2013 when I got this MacBookPro have not found a mission critical reason I need to upgrade my OS.
I do run a newer OS on my older laptop (if that makes sense) just for testing stuff.
But I was able to confirm that my old setup, using Keynote Tweet 2.5 and Keynote ’09 still works on my machine.
The command line tweeting tool twurl still works
Can I still twurl?
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) October 16, 2017
And a test Keynote deck I rigged up successfully tweeted:
Does this auto tweeting even work anymore?
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) October 16, 2017
which came from Keyote
From inside my ancient copy of Keynote ’09
Wow
Imagine I am tweeting as I do a presentation. What a concept.
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) October 16, 2017
While it works for me, I am an edge case. But I likely have a need to use this for upcoming workshops (like coming up so fast I should be working them and not blogging this).
I told Amy sometime in November I’d (maybe) dig back into the scripts and/or research if others have cracked this open. So if anyone has had any success getting this (or another) script to automatically tweet from Keynote, please chime in.
Yes, I know it might be possible soon with Google Slides. Yes, I know some people schedule tweets in tweetdeck. It’s still not quite this effect.
On another brain plane I am also thinking about adding it as a SPLOTpoint feature.
Later. Yes, later.
Featured Image: A derivative of a derivative remixed. The background image of album covers is cropped from a pixabay photo by flo222 that is in the public domain via Creative Commons CC0. I did some Photoshop replacement of the AC/DC Highway to Hell cover (sorry guys, still a favorite on my turntable) with the featured image created for a 2013 blog post that was itself modified from Tweet and Toot Cover flickr photo by Jacob Whittaker shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
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Of course, yes.