Yesterday I wrote about my love of the Mac mini. So dependable and unobtrusive, it's the Honda Civic of computers. In the post, I briefly described how we use Dropbox to send routinely-updated Keynote files to the mini. A few of you wrote to ask for details, so I decided to share that information here on the blog. We use two pieces of software: Dropbox and iCal.

Dropbox

Here's the setup. First, the Mac mini is connected to the projector in the Projection Room above the theater via DVI. Every day, it runs a slideshow before the orientation film. That slideshow contains sponsorship information, museum news, etc.

It's updated once a week or so by someone in the art department (we'll call her "Janie"). Janie's desk is a couple hundred yards and two buildings away from the Projection Room. The Keynote file lives in a Dropbox folder that both Janie's PC and the mini can access. Of course, we don't want Janie editing the slideshow while it's running before a room full of guests. That's where iCal comes in.

iCal

We stop showing the film at 4:00 PM and Janie arrives for the day at 9:00 AM, so we set up two repeating iCal events.

The first event launches the slideshow in the morning. Every weekday at 8:45 AM (doors open at 9:00), there's a repeating iCal event with an alarm set to open the slideshow where it lives in Dropbox. Note that the show has been set to run at launch and loop indefinitely in Keynote.

What about updating? Easy. We stop running the slideshow at 4:00 PM and Janie leaves for the day at 5:00 PM. A second repeating iCal event has an alarm that runs the following super-simple Applescript:

Tell application "Keynote"
quit
End tell

The script does just what you expect -- it kills Keynote. This runs at 4:05 PM each weekday, and frees Janie to spend 10 or 15 minutes updating the file from her PC just before she goes home. The next morning, the first iCal event re-launches the slideshow and the cycle repeats.

That's how two free pieces of software (iCal and Dropbox) combine with an inexpensive, consumer level one to create a simple and effective solution to a problem. Best of all, it doesn't require a computer science degree or even a week with a giant manual. The iCal events and script are invisible to Janie. All she knows is, "I open the folder on my PC, change the slideshow, hit Save and I'm done." Sure, we could have dumped it on a central server, set up some sort of FTP voodoo that would have given Janie a headache, etc. But why? If the simple solution works, use it.

If you try something similar, let me know how it goes. Thanks to everyone who asked about this.

I hope this post gets filed in the "I knew I wasn't the only one!" mental filing cabinets of many. Because if it doesn't, then it makes me the only one who really looks forward to the music Apple uses in its keynotes. Whether it's a song that leads up to Steve Jobs' entrance on stage, or one used in software or hardware demos, there's no denying that music is very much a part of Apple's DNA. Heck, the company's namesake reflects Steve's love for the Beatles. Apple occasionally invites some of music's biggest names to perform at its events because, as Steve says, "it's all about the music."

And this post is all about the music. It's all about the music that Apple has used in one way, shape, or form at its keynote events. Although by no means a definitive list, it's certainly a fair sample.

It's one of the most overlooked product refreshes of the day, but the MacBook Air still deserves some credit. Not only did the Air get a drastic price drop (specifically with the SSD model), but it also gained a few specs. The base MacBook Air now starts at $1499US with a 1.86 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, 120GB SATA drive (runs at 4200 rpm), and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card. The second model, which adds a 2.13 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor and 128GB SSD drive will only run you $1799US. That's a huge difference considering the last SSD model cost $2499 -- a difference of $700!

It is also worth noting that the MBAir now comes with a USB Ethernet Adapter in the box. You can also choose a keyboard format in either: English, Western Spanish, French, or Japanese. If you have been wanting a MacBook Air, but let the price hold you back, then there's no reason for you to complain any longer.

You can see all of the specs on the new MacBook Air models by visiting either the product page or the Apple online store.

With all the news floating around today about the new iPhone 3G S, and the updates on the release dates of iPhone 3.0 or Snow Leopard, you might feel deprived if you didn't get to make it out to this year's WWDC. Don't fret. You can now watch the keynote stream on the Apple website and see all of the announcements from the event. Click here to go to the stream page.

You can view all of our coverage from this week on the TUAW WWDC page.

Update: You should soon be able to download the keynote as a podcast from iTunes via the Apple Keynotes feed, which can be found here [click opens iTunes].

As with most keynote presentations, Apple released a lot of numbers about just how many people are adopting the Mac and iPhone platforms.

First, over the last three years, the active Mac OS X installed base has grown from 25 million users to 75 million users. This is great news for the platform and for the entire Mac ecosystem.

Also, over 5,200 developers from 54 countries around the world are attending WWDC. Over a million people have downloaded the free iPhone SDK, and created 50,000 applications for Apple iPhones and iPod touch devices.

Speaking of which, over 40 million iPhones and iPod touches have been sold to date. In April, Apple announced that those users had downloaded a cumulative total of one billion applications.

June 8, 2009.

Today's a day filled with incredible anticipation for Apple fans. The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference opens with a keynote by Apple Senior VP of Product Marketing Phil Schiller, who is widely expected to announce the availability of the 3rd generation of iPhone firmware and hardware, provide a release date for Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), and hopefully throw in a few surprises in the meantime.

While TUAW has no "assets on the ground" inside the keynote (Brett Terpstra will be outside for developer interviews immediately afterward), our team is preparing for full meta-liveblogging of the event. Join us for this event beginning at about 10 AM Pacific Time / 1 PM Eastern Time / 5 PM GMT as TUAW bloggers Steve Sande, Megan Lavey, and Erica Sadun provide you with nonstop coverage of the keynote. You can also follow our event-specific Twitter feed for updates throughout the week at http://twitter.com/tuaw_wwdc.

Apple issued a press release this morning, saying that Worldwide Marketing VP Phil Schiller would lead a "team of Apple executives" to deliver the Worldwide Developer Conference keynote June 8 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific (1 p.m. Eastern).

According to the press release, attendees will receive a developer preview of Snow Leopard, the next major version of Mac OS X. The developer preview is designed to show off a new version of QuickTime, QuickTime X, multi-core and GPU processor support, and accessibility enhancements.

"At WWDC, we will be giving our developers a final Developer Preview release so they can see the incredible progress we've made on Snow Leopard and work with us as we move toward its final release," said Bertrand Serlet, senior VP of Software Engineering.

During the conference, iPhone developers can also attend over 100 technical sessions and meet with more than a thousand Apple engineers about iPhone OS 3.0, the release says.

WWDC runs from June 8 to June 12 at Moscone West in San Francisco. The conference is sold out.

Apple's marquee presentation tool may make it easy to look professional when it comes to showing off in front of an in-person audience, but when it comes to sharing those killer decks online the choices have been limited; Keynote's package-based file format made uploading and decoding pretty challenging for most. Among these, Slideshare stood out by allowing Keynote uploads -- assuming you compressed your file to a .zip before shipping it along.

Now that Keynote '09 does automatic compression of .key files (which makes it a lot easier to throw them on a flash drive, among other things), Slideshare has announced direct support for Keynote files. Upload your presentations with glee, and share them at will! The conversion process is still a bit rough around the edges, so in some cases you may have better results by saving the Keynote file to PPT instead... but it's still a welcome development.

[via KeynoteUser]

You can create some wonderful visual effects with Keynote '09; good enough, in some cases, to make experienced After Effects artists say "You did that in Keynote?!," which is always very satisfying. Despite Keynote's power for presentations, there are a few things that it doesn't do natively -- play video during a transition, for instance. Fortunately, some of these tricks can be accomplished by a long-honored approach known as "faking it."

If you have a video playing in the background of a slide while you trigger a dissolve transition to the next slide, ordinarily you'll see a distracting freeze of the video playback as the transition effect runs. The way around this, usable for many (not all) slide transitions, is to pull the transition forward into the slide with the video.

I do this by grabbing a screenshot of the initial state of the next slide, and then do a build-in action to dissolve (or flip, or what have you) that screenshot into the slide that's playing the video, above the video. The video keeps playing behind the screenshot as it dissolves in, and then you can gracefully move to the next slide, invisibly or with a dissolve -- the placeholder screenshot and the slide should be indistinguishable. In practice, this works better with a fade through black or a solid color than with a slide graphic, as the alignment can be tricky, but if you play around with it you can get it to work well.

Sounds confusing? Allow me to demonstrate with a brief screencast in the 2nd half of the post. You'll see the "vanilla" transition including the video freeze, and then the fake transition that's done by dissolving a full-screen graphic in over the video as it plays. (The video clip is my poorly-shot night line cinematography from the opening of the NYC 14th Street Apple Store.)

Updated to clarify that the process uses a build-in action, not a transition.

Coming up soon: my favorite Keynote trick for visual fireworks.

Ivan at the great Creative Bits has posted a nice tutorial on creating animated charts in Keynote. It's a simple process really, making use of the build feature of the Inspector. You've got to love Keynote. Even a person who dislikes slide shows (like me) can enjoy putting one together.

If you're after more powerful chart and graph options in Keynote, check out Chart Gallery. For even more Keynote fun, you can't miss Keynote User or our own first look at Keynote '09.

Humble Daisy's ProfCast is a well-respected tool for turning PowerPoint and Keynote slideshows into podcasts, among many other features (including the ability to record live presentations). The software was recently updated to version 2.3.0 and if you haven't been motivated to try it before, it is definitely worth a look now.

Humble Daisy is currently offering the software for 75% off its retail price from today until January 24 to celebrate the Mac's 25th birthday. ProfCast normally retails for $59.95USD, and education discounts are available, but the sale brings the price down to $14.99. ProfCast requires OS X 10.4 and later.

And for the confused, myself included, ProfCast's Web site does say that the discount is for 25% off rather than 75%. However, by clicking on the coupon for a single-seat license, you can see that the price really is $14.99.

Customers who buy iWork '09 retail boxes may be surprised by what they don't find inside. Namely, a registration code. Apple has stopped shipping iWork with a registration code starting with version '09. "Install iWork '09 from the enclosed disc and you're ready to go," says Apple.

Of course, those using the downloaded trial version will have to enter a serial number if they want to activate their trial version. While iWork has traditionally required users to enter a registration code, iLife has not. Some have implied that this is a tacit invitation to piracy -- install our software on random machines, get hooked then pay for an upgrade, but we're unconvinced. Also, we have no indication (as of this writing, at least) that the iWork apps don't phone home to verify that they're validly installed.

[Via Ars]

One of the coolest features of the just announced Keynote '09 is the corresponding $0.99 iPhone / iPod touch controller application (iTunes link) which allows you to advance slides, see your notes, and even see your next slide on your mobile device's screen so long as it's connected to the same wifi network. Once I had a look at it, however, I was surprised to discover that there were already several similar applications available in the iTunes store which work with Keynote '08 and even have quite a few more functions.

I haven't had a chance to test them all, but there are at least four applications out there including (all iTunes links): Pointer Remote (which also works with PowerPoint) ($0.99), jfControl ($3.99), AirMote ($4.99), and Stage Hand ($7.99). Three of the four require installing a small helper app on your Mac which then interfaces with the iPhone app (AirMote is the exception since it uses the Mac's built-in VNC protocols). Of these, Stage Hand seems to have the most features, including some nifty ones like advancing directly to a particular slide, on-device timers, a highlighter, and a blackout/whiteout function. (Stage Hand presently has limited Keynote '09 compatibility, but they say they're working on it.)

Let us know in the comments what your favorite iPhone / iPod touch based Keynote remote control is.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I detest slide presentations. Ugh, even typing that gave me the heeby-jeebies. I've sat through too many demos during which some absolute bore read to me as if we were in preschool circle time. Not to mention the blue, marbleized buttons and millions of bullet points. Oh, the bullet points.

When Keynote was introduced in January of 2003, my feelings were mixed. On one hand, Apple is a stylish company that makes thoughtful, easy to use software. On the other hand, this was presentation software. How good could it be? The answer is "pretty darn good," and even better now with the latest version of Keynote.

When you first launch the demo version of iWork, you're greeted with an invitation to try or buy the software. This splash screen is much more attractive in '09 than it was in '08, and that change is indicative of nearly every aspect of Keynote '09: It's very beautiful.

Click below to read more.

As usual, Apple has released a Quicktime video of the keynote address from this year's Macworld Expo. This one's rather historic, as well all know. It's simultaneously Phil Schiller's first and Apple's last.

Right now it's available as a stream from Apple's website, but it typically shows up in the iTunes Store as a free download shortly thereafter. Be sure to grab a copy and "own a piece of history" as they say. Whoever "they" are.

So, what did you think of this year's presentation? We think Phil did a great job and was greeted warmly by the crowd. Sure, a little bit of fanfare would have been nice, but that was Tony Bennet's role, right?