[TxMt] [OT]: Ghostwriter

[Allan Odgaard]

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