Turn RSS feed items into Keynote slides with Python Appscript

I wanted to set up a kiosk system that displayed some static and some constantly-updated information. I already had a kiosk that used Apple Keynote in full-screen presentation mode to show a slideshow, but all of the slides themselves were static.

In pondering the idea of keeping the slideshow fresh with more dynamic and up-to-date information, I wondered if I could start with an RSS or ATOM feed as the source. After all, the Web is full of dynamically-updated content, thanks to blogging and content management (CMS) software. These updates are often streamed out in RSS or ATOM format. If that software is already present and the workflow is (or can be) a part of a group’s Web presence, then repurposing those same dynamic updates is an efficient use of peoples’ time. That the software is often reasonable for use by trained staff or dedicated volunteers is another benefit.

With that in mind, I constructed a proof of concept that let me add new slides to a Keynote presentation.

For this task, I wanted to avoid controlling Keynote with AppleScript because I’d had an interest in trying my hand at Python Appscript for a while. I found Appscript to be simple to use when controlling Keynote — and it made as much if not more sense to me than AppleScript did.

Unfortunately, Appscript is now deprecated, so while my proof of concept (below) works for now, it may not continue to do so with inevitable march of software progress.

For this sample project, we need to have the Universal Feed Parser and Appscript installed.

Unfortunately, with the disappearance of Mark Pilgrim and his projects from the Web, the original source site for the Universal Feed Parser no longer exists. However, UFP is still open source software and people had the source and are interested in further developing it. When installing UFP, Python “easy_install” will fetch it from its home on Google Code.

At this point, with two key Python modules in strange circumstances, you are probably wondering what I was thinking. My only defense is that I did all of this some time ago and neither the AppScript nor UFP situations was apparent at the time.

Install Python Appscript. This requires that you are logged in with a “sudo”-ready account, or have used “su” to switch to such a user.

Install Python Appscript.

Launch Keynote and create a new presentation from the template selector. We will enter the “title” and “summary” RSS/ATOM feed data into the first Keynote presentation, so you need to have a presentation open first.

In either a Python script or the Python interpreter in Terminal, use the following sample code to download the feed data from the Apple Hot News RSS feed and enter it into the Keynote document.

I picked the Apple Hot News RSS feed because it is commonly seen on Macs that use the RSS screen saver and its defaults. Because of that, I also thought the feed was likely to be around long enough into the future to serve as a good example for others that came across this article. I am not endorsing this particular feed, don’t follow it, and don’t know its contents at any given time. You are free to substitute the RSS/ATOM feed URL of your own choosing — well, as long as the Universal Feed Parser can handle it — with the following example.

The Keynote document will be populated with new slides. Each new slide will feature the “title” of the RSS/ATOM feed item as the slide title, and the “summary” as the slide body. That’s it!

I’ll leave it as an exercise for another day to consider how to work a dynamic batch of RSS/ATOM-based slides into an existing static presentation.