On 30/12/2005, at 21:37, hadley wickham wrote:
This email is a bit off topic, but I thought it might be useful to any developers who are making screencasts. I've written a little ruby script called ghostwriter which uses apple gui event scripting to produce applescript that makes it looks like you're typing. [...]
Very neat indeed -- Apple has a Demo Assistant [1] which they use in their WWDC sessions.
This is a service which reads from a text file and inserts the next line from that file in the current (service supporting) application (on a key press). This isn't as neat as your script, but I like the interactive part, so the actor can control the pace while the presentation is running.
If you like it as well, what you maybe could do was have a ---WAIT which would cause the script to read one byte from /tmp/ some_named_pipe (man 1 mkfifo) and then setup QS to write one byte to that pipe on a hotkey -- just thinking out load here…
Oh, and maybe insert random pauses in the text typed, so it looks more human :)
[1] /Developer/Examples/AppKit/DemoAssistant