Quickly find old Keynote and Pages documents

With every new version of iWork come new file formats for Keynote and Pages. The old files won't convert transparently into the new versions; you have to explicitly save them to the new formats. And one wonders if these old formats may one day be declared obsolete, unable to be opened at all by some future version of iWork.To avoid these issues, I always upgrade my Pages and Keynote documents to the latest format whenever a new version of iWork comes out. An automatic means of doing this would involve some hard-core AppleScript, but since I don't have too many iWork documents, I'm content with opening and re-saving them to their new format manually. The only problem: How do I find the Pages and Keynote documents scattered throughout my Documents sub-folders?Luckily, the Finder's Smart Folders feature makes this easy. Just create a new Smart Folder, and for the first crit...

published on Tuesday, the 21. August 2007, macosxhints

Choose an audio input device based on sound levels

I frequently record Keynote presentations I give using my Mac (using ProfCast). Typically I use a wireless lapel mic and have my sound preferences pane set to record from Line In. However, on occasion I forget to turn on my mic, or the battery is dead, and so I get nothing but silence. In these instances, I'd like to be able to use my PowerBook's internal mic as a backup, so I set about finding a method using AppleScript to accomplish this.I eventually got something working with the help of a freeware program called AudioLeak that monitors the RMS sound level of the selected input source. Together with a little GUI scripting, I can have my Mac try to connect to Line In, but switch to the internal mic if the line is dead. Here's the final script. I have this script embed...

published on Tuesday, the 26. June 2007, macosxhints

Extract URLs from Keynote presentations

I often do presentations using Apple's Keynote. In many cases, I use lots of web resources for URLs and screenshots. I've always had a problem where people are asking me for a list of links referenced in a presentation, because they couldn't write them down fast enough. So I wrote two handy one-liner Unix programs in order to extract all or certain URLs from a Keynote presentation. Note: I originally wanted to do this using AppleScript, but unfortunately, Keynote does not yet offer any possibilities for accessing text and links through AppleScript. That's why I wound up using the shell instead. Both one-liners require you to set the current directory to the top-level directory within the Keynote presentation bundle. The most comfortable way to switch to it is by typing "cd " (yes, with a trailing space) in Terminal.app (or iTerm) and then dragging your Keynote presentation from the Finder to the shell, and pressing Return in the shell window. This first version ext...

published on Wednesday, the 7. February 2007, macosxhints

A script to create a print-only version of Keynote slides

My Keynote presentations contain a lot more slides (Titles, etc.) than the slides I'd actually like to have in my hand-out for attendees. One could set the slides to skipped (Keynote offers an option to leave out skipped slides when printing), but that produces a lot of work for me to skip the slides before printing, but re-enable them before a presentation. If you have large presentations which are given quite often and you're constantly improving the details, this can be quite a hassle. So I decided to write a little AppleScript which helps me to do the job: The idea is to add the text handout-noprint in a small font in the speaker's notes for all slides which should be suppressed when printing. Afterwards, run the AppleScript, which will set these slides to the status "skipped," and save the resulting print-only version on your Desktop. Now you can easily print ...

published on Friday, the 22. September 2006, macosxhints