Making your Targus Bluetooth Presenter actually usable

Here's a tip that will come in useful if you'd like to use a Targus Bluetooth Presenter (AMP11US or AMP11EU) with your Mac.

It seems that the Targus wireless presenter remote (an otherwise nice device) was designed by a committee of morons, none of which actually ever gave any Keynote presentations.

Apparently someone at Targus said that the buttons are supposed to be for "Next Slide" and "Previous Slide", which other people took literally, so the buttons just jump over to the next slide, skipping any builds or transitions that you might have in place. All you can have is flat slides. Goodbye builds, goodbye special effects, goodbye bullet points, goodbye movies. The buttons generate "Shift-CursorDown" and "Shift-CursorUp", forcibly skipping over anything that isn't a full slide.

Am I being unnecessarily harsh calling the designers "morons"? I don't think so. If you design a device whose only purpose is to facilitate presenting, and then you create a version specifically for the Mac (I quote from the Targus web page: "the only wireless presenter dedicated to Mac users") to be used with Keynote — is it too much to ask that you design it so that the two keys on the device actually perform useful functions? I mean, seriously — two keys, next step and previous step, how hard is that?

It's also rather clear that most "reviews" that you can find online are junk and the "reviewers" haven't actually used the device to perform presentations.

Fortunately, there is a solution. There is a small, free utility called KeyRemap4Macbook. Download it, install it (requires a restart), then go into your Mac OS X Preferences, access the KeyRemapper panel, and from within its last settings pane access the private.xml file that stores custom key mappings.

Once you get there, enter the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  <list>
    <item>
      <name>Targus Wireless Presenter Keynote Fix</name>
      <identifier>private.targus_wireless_presenter_keynote_fix</identifier>
      <autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::CURSOR_DOWN, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::CURSOR_RIGHT</autogen>
      <autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::CURSOR_UP, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::CURSOR_LEFT</autogen>
    </item>
  </list>
</root>

Save the file, go back to the first pane of the KeyRemap configuration and click "Reload XML". You might also want to check the box that says "Don't remap an internal keyboard".

And there you go — what this does is remaps the useless key combinations that the Targus Presenter generates to simple "cursor right" and "cursor left", which do the right thing in Keynote.

Enjoy!

Folder actions on Mac OS X: usable now?

AppleScript release notes for Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.5.6):

Folder Actions now attempts to delay calling “files added” actions on files until they are done being copied. Previous versions called “files added” actions on new files as soon as they appeared in the file system. This was a problem for files that were being copied into place: if the file was sufficiently large or coming over a slow server link, the file might appear several seconds before it was done being copied, and running the folder action before it finished copying would behave badly. Folder Actions now watches if the file is changing size: if it stays the same size for more than three seconds, it is deemed “done”, and the action is called.

My experience with folder actions was that they are one big race condition waiting to bite you. It’s something all the tutorials conveniently glossed over. I kept wondering why Apple kept them if they are so obviously unreliable.

Hopefully that change, while far from correct, will make them usable.