Keypress Keynote Auto Advancing Utility
Author: Kevin B. of GutterFMA.com Price: Freeware Requirements: Keynote 1.0 or higher, GUI Scripting System Events Reviewer: Brian A. Peat

I was pretty surprised to see this program posted over on KeynoteHQ. I thought it was too good to be true. Once I looked closer at it, I realized that the author is using the same tricks Apple uses in the Sony Clicker AppleScript package. There's a new User Interface AppleScript set that allows you to control menu selections, keystrokes and mouse clicks, even in programs that don't support it. Thankfully, it works pretty well.

Keypress is a pretty simple program. It only really does ONE thing. It lets you set a delay time for a given Keynote show, and then it plays it automatically, using that delay as a pause before it advances to the next build for you.

It only takes a few minutes to get everything working. Download Keypress, then download and install the GUI Scripting System Events from Apple's site, and you're ALMOST ready to go. There is one VERY important setting that is buried in the ReadMe file for the Scripting Events package. You MUST turn on the "Enable Access for Assistive Devices" in the universal Access System Preferences panel. If you don't, it won't work correctly. Once you have gotten everything installed and set, open a show in Keynote, and then open Keypress.

You should see something like this:

Pretty basic. You enter your delay in seconds, choose your Keynote show from the list of open Keynote files, and click Run Show. I had a little problem with Keypress seeing my show files, but a quick Quit and relaunch and I was up and running.

You'll notice though, that there are NO other options. If you want slides to stay up longer than builds, your only option at this point is to make extra copies of your slides with NO builds or transitions on them. Every slide will show for the time set in the delay box, so if you need a slide for 15 seconds, make 2 more after the first one.

Also, there is currently no way to loop a show, so you'd need to copy and paste the whole show as many times as you need it to loop.

Overall, I am pretty impressed with this little app. It's not the answer to everything missing in Keynote, but it sure helps out until Apple adds the features we want.