• Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Programmatically Running And Looping Keynote Presentations

    These days, you can spend a lot of money buying really nice digital signage tools. And if you’re doing so, then you likely have some pretty dynamic content you’d like to load. Something that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a dynamic content platform, but which is nice for the quick presentation that you whip up and want to use for a form of digital signage is Keynote presentations. These are inexpensive and can be played on monitors through AirPlay or directly through a Mac Mini connected to a television or big monitor. Great for a monitor in the company lobby, the hallway in the school or for subliminal messaging at…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Invoke ScreenSaver in Mac OS X with a Script

    While troubleshooting some issues with a Screen Saver that just wouldn’t fire up. Even when you told the ScreenSaver to open (timed or via Expose) it wouldn’t work. Given the security implications for the given environment having a Screen Saver invoked automatically and manually are both requirements. So I found how to open it from the shell. From the /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS working directory simply do: ./ScreenSaverEngine The Screen Saver opened from the shell so I figured I would try it from an AppleScript, so isolated the application id to com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine and launched it manually: osascript -e ‘tell application id “com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine” to launch’ This didn’t work.  Replaced the ScreenSaver.Framework (located in /System/Library/Frameworks) with…