Giving a talk with TextMate
My talk at the Conferencia Rails 2006 delved into Rails internals and so the content was mainly source code. I tried several approaches to writing it, from Keynote to a quick and dirty script to run text slides in Terminal.app. But the place where code lives is the editor, and so that was the final choice. You get syntax highlighting, scroll bars, and no need to copy and paste with style between applications. It feels like the right place to show code.
The editor of choice was TextMate, I use it practically since it was available. I prepared the talk in a project that contained the Rails source tree, a dummy Rails application to try stuff, and the very slides. To trace code execution in Rails I used plain old Find in Project most of the time. The actual presentation was in a different project, groups were used to structure the presentation in sections and allow for slide ordering within them.
To start the talk all files are opened beforehand, one by one. The easiest way to do that is to select the first one, focus on the editor, type ⌥⌘> (or ⌥⌘` depending on your keymap), and go down the drawer. With that trick Allan told me in the mailing list you go down the project opening files because the focus remains in the drawer.
When I give a talk or a class I always like to freely walk around, and so I normally use some kind of remote control. How could I use one here? I played around with Salling Clicker to no avail, but finally discovered Mira provides a way to assign keystrokes to Apple Remote buttons (why are Apple Remotes white for black laptops?). It was trivial to map play/menu to ⌥⌘⇢/⇠ to move to the next/ prev tab. I could even map increase/ decrease font size and scroll up/down to the rest of buttons. Very handy.
As a final touch, you can get full screen mode with megazoomer. All in all the presentation took the form I exactly wanted for this talk.