Last night, I gave my first presentation in a really long time. It went really well! (I used to have a terrible fear of public speaking, so much so that I changed majors in college to avoid having to take a public speaking class (I switched back, because I realized I was being foolish. I’m glad I did, because I met a nice lady (we went out once, and it was the worst date of my life; but I digress))). The presentation was on Haml & Sass, and is available on github if you are interested.

But this post isn’t about the presentation, but about the tools I used to build/show it. I spent some time trying to get colorized code samples in to Keynote ’09, but did not have much luck. After a little bit of research, I found Dave Thomas’ codex, an html based presentation builder that uses the s5 javascript presentation tool. Codex allows you to reference code files or embed code snippets, which will be pulled in during the build process and wrapped in a SyntaxHighlighted div. It processes ‘slide’ files and creates one html page containing the entire presentation. I modified it a bit for this presentation to add support for adding text to the previous slide, and included all of the available SyntaxHighlighter language modules in the output. The modified version is here.

To display the presentation, I created a Fluid app, set it to me chromeless, and made it draggable from anywhere. I then installed iRed Lite, which allows you to send keystrokes to any app using the Apple infrared remote. Once that was all in place, I hooked up the projector, dragged the Fluid app to the projected display, and gave the presentation.