Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / May 2005

Well, my original posting was seeking advice on how to get the remote to
work with Safari -- not to solicit alternative technologies.

In any case, my colleague (fellow Phalanx hoplite), Marc Prewitt, came
up with this Javascript which we've included in the POSTAMBLE file of
Mark Jason Dominus's txt2slides.

<script><!--
document.getElementById("next").focus();
    document.onkeydown = function (evt) {
        var code = evt.keyCode;
        switch (code) {
        case 34:
        case 78:
            location.href = document.links["next"].href;
            break;
        case 33:
        case 80:
            location.href = document.links["prev"].href;
            break;
        case 72:
            location.href = document.links["home"].href;
            break;
        case 76:
            location.href = document.links["last"].href;
            break;
        }
        return true;
    };
--></script>

where we have 4 screen links, 2 of which we want to control from the
wireless remote.

jimk

While googling, I had to wade through several pages of links to
different vendors who sell that Kensington product.  The link I
mentioned was the only one that gave any clue as to how to *adapt* the
Kensington wireless remote to the task at hand.

Incidentally, I contacted Kensington tech support about this and they
were absolutely clueless!  I now quote the central paragraph of their
response -- *verbatim*!

"I appreciate your immense interest in Kensington products. I am sorry
to inform that the product has been designed for presentation
applications and has been sucessfully tested on powerpoint. I would
request you to try programming the buttons, however, we cannot assure
whether it would work or not."

In other words:  We can't figure it out; you do it!

I e-mailed them back saying that I (or, actually, my partner) had
discovered the answer ... but that they would have to search the
Internet to find out how to do that.

But I'm very glad to have an answer because the organizers of
YAPC::NA::2005 in Toronto -- the conference at which we'll be presenting
-- have said that they want presenters to target HTML (rather than, say,
PDF) for archiving their presentations.  (They also gave a plug to the
slideshow technology mentioned in another posting to this thread, but
we've already done most of our show in MJD's txt2slides.)

jim