Scripting a slideshow

[Jeanmichel]

Hi Guys.

I have searched the world to try and find a slideshow that will run live and have the ability to reload as new images are added to the slideshow directory, dislpaying the new image as the next slide and then carry on looping.

I have had absolutely no luck and figure that scripting is the only way this may work.
I’m not asking for anyone to write a script for me but if anyone has any ideas as to how to start or may have come accross this problem before I would be most grateful to hear from you.

Thanks,

JM

[Martin_Michel]

Hi Jeanmichel,

You could do this with RagTime, as its presentation engine (and the whole program) is fully scriptable. One of the commands allows to update the presentation while running:

There is an extra command which is not available when controling a slide show manually: update presented page

Imagine that you are showing a certain page of a layout in a slide show. While showing that page you manipulate some objects on this page by AppleScript. The slide does not change of course, you see the state of the page at the time when the slide was created. But if your script says update presented page, the slide will be recreated in the background and then it will be shown immediatly on the screen. So you can use SlideTime and AppleScript to program your own animations in RagTime. (We have added an example script to show this technique.)

SlideTime from ItterSoft (the RagTime presentation engine) is now an integrated part of RagTime since version 5.6. Unfortunately RagTime is NOT cheap…

[StefanK]

Hi,

I guess, this is not possible in plain AppleScript.
You can use the slideshow.framework in Obj-C, so at least AppleScript Studio with some Obj-C bridges can do this

For an Obj-C example look at this article

[Joy]

Hi, Jeanmichel

i’ve a very simple solution:
get “Phoenix slides”

http://blyt.net/phxslides/

this app isn’t scriptable, but my script works nevertheless, here:

--Phoenix slides

--on idle
--with timeout of 320 seconds
tell application "Finder" to set filelist to the folder of front window as text
activate application "Phoenix Slides"
tell application "Phoenix Slides" to open filelist
activate application "Phoenix Slides"
--end timeout
--end idle

put the script in yourhomefolder/Library/Scripts/
as applescript (.scpt) for manually refreshing, or save it as application (.app) with the “idle” command for stay open and refresh the given front window (better: set the path as string, like
set filelist to “HD:Users:home:Pictures:”
instead of
tell application “Finder” to set filelist to the folder of front window as text)
the purpose of this script is to refresh the front window.
hope thats helps.