GeistFabrik is part of a bunch of projects I'm building to figure out new ways of building software with LLMs. I'm hoping to figure out how we keep the best of what we have and still take advantage of the strengths of the new thing whilst mitigating the weaknesses. For example at the event I was inspired by one of the other presentations to start exploring how sentiment analysis could improve GeistFabrik. You can see my research and specification steps over on Github. This is the kind of work that's now cheap enough (in terms of my time and the cost of tokens) that the relative Return On Ambition is so high that I have to pursue it.
After nearly 8 years since my last blog post I finally found a solution to my problem with exporting PDFs from Keynote that include speaker notes. That solution is an open source tool called Better Keynote Export. It's a CLI tool that uses AppleScript to generate PDFs with speaker notes that look like the files we used to export from Keynote 09.
I use Keynote and I like it. However like many other professional-grade products from Apple it seems to to be changing in ways that make it less suited to my needs.
In Keynote 09 I can easily export a good looking PDF with presenter notes and upload it to Speakerdeck or Slideshare.
In Keynote 7.3.1 that's no longer possible. All you can do is export a PDF with presenter notes that take up more than 50% of the page. Or you can export something decent-looking but it won't have presenter notes.
There's an OpenRadar issue for it but it's been open since July 2015 and it still hasn't been fixed.
That leaves people like me with a limited set of options.
Stop using Keynote.
Go back to using Keynote 09.
Use Keynote 7.3.1 then export to Keynote 09 format and from Keynote 09 export a PDF.
Export a PDF without speaker notes and hope that people will wait for the video of your presentation to be available.
Adopt Monica Dinculescu's approach where you change your slides after the presentation so that your speaker notes are part of each slide.
In the past I've thought of the web as a convoy of browsers. That turns out to be wrong.
Nowadays (thanks to a long lunch with Paul Downey, Jeni Tennison, et al) I've begun thinking of the web as a ship of Theseus where, despite replacing every single part of the stack, what's left is still recognisably the web.
This made me realise that we are surrounded by unexamined and ossified metaphors that are in danger of becoming thought-terminating cliches. For example:
- open web versus (presumably) closed web
- the web browser is the web platform is the web
- the web as a platform
- web apps
- web versus native
One of the reasons I present at conferences like OpenTech is because I want to have my mind changed and my complacent metaphors jolted. This year my presentation came out of asking myself "what do I most like about the web?" My initial list was:
- its universality (view source meant everybody everywhere could cut and paste their way to something that sort of worked).
- its omnivorous inclusiveness (it tended to absorb neighbouring or competing technologies like WAIS, Gopher, NNTP and FTP).
- its hypertextuality, intertwingularity and document orientation because they open the door to new forms of argumentation as well as letting us create living documents.
- its peculiar notion of addressability without guarantees about the nature of the resources at the end of the links.
This presentation started out as my oft-repeated but never documented "HTML 3.2 was the last good version of HTML" rant. It channeled some of my distress with the ideas behind HTML 5 and the notion that there is a "web platform" which arbitrarily excludes certain technologies (like Flash and native apps) but includes others (like JavaScript). In its final form it asked if today's open web platform is still the web. Now I have my answer.
That answer is driven by two realisations. Firstly it turns out that browsers are not the only user agent. They're not even the only kind of user agent. Secondly now that deeplinking is becoming mere linking it is clearer than ever that apps are just domain-specific user-agents. As a consequence it becomes clear that native versus web is merely a debate about whether we should use 1 universal user-agent or N domain-specific user-agents.
Since browsers and native apps are merely different kinds of user-agents I think it's a mistake to conflate browsers and the web. I think we run the risk of mistaking the capabilities and roadmap of today's most popular kind of user agent for the capabilities and roadmap of the web. For example user-agents that don't support Javascript or CSS are equally legitimate but less popular constituents of the web. However there's a strong temptation to consider them to be obsolete or lagging members of our convoy and thus leave them behind.
The web has changed, is changing and will keep on changing. The convoy is bigger than I originally thought because there are lots of overlooked user-agents out there. These apps aren't part of the web any more than browsers are but their addressable/linkable content most definitely is part of the web. Just because that content has a preferred user-agent doesn't change this.
Perhaps, like the Gutenberg Parenthesis, there is a 'Browser Parenthesis' that is also closing?
