Automator workflow of the month: Automate kiosk presentations
Increasingly we find video monitors in offices and stores that play looping slideshows. All too often these things must either be started by the first people to arrive at work in the morning (and stopped by the last person leaving) or, worse, are left running 24 hours a day. With Automator you can make presentations automatically switch on and off at exactly the times you specify. Here’s how.
Fine-tune your presentation
To begin, create a presentation in Apple’s Keynote that includes all the slides you desire. Within Keynote choose View > Show Inspector and click the Document tab (the first one) in the resulting Inspector window. Enable the Loop slideshow option and from the Presentation pop-up menu choose Self-playing. Configure the Transitions and Builds fields so that each slide plays for the length you want before moving to the next one. Save the presentation and quit Keynote.
Build your workflow
Launch Automator (in your Applications folder) and from the workflow chooser that appears, select Calendar Alarm and click Choose. Select the Files & Folders library and from within that library drag the Get Specified Finder Items and Open Finder Items actions into the workflow area. Next, select the Utilities library and drag the Pause action into the workflow. Finally, select the Presentations library and add Start Keynote Slideshow to the workflow.
In the Finder locate your Keynote presentation and drag it into the first action (Get Specified Finder Items). The second action’s pop-up menu should read Open With Default Application. Configure the Pause action to pause for 5 seconds. And the final action—Start Keynote Slideshow—should start from slide number 1.
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