Based on some Twitter conversations with @fredjean about the Codex Ruby Gem, I’ve been inspired to stop taking screenshots of code for slides and rather putting in formatted text. But this isn’t as easy to do as it should be. Eclipse 3.4 has lost (for me, and others) the ability to copy and paste rich text so that it appears formatted in the paste destination. Maybe that’s a MacOS failure of later Eclipse versions. No matter though, as I drift father from Eclipse usage. My favorite other two editors can fulfill this need nicely with two simple add-ons.

Jim Weirich’s blog post about using Ruby and posting source as a means

Dave Thomas (@pragdave) chimes in with his similar thread about presenting code — gasp — without Keynote entire.

Textmate: Copy as RTF Bundle (Plugin)

This sweet plugin lets you copy formatted code of any language TextMate recognizes as RTF. Perfectly suitable for pasting into MS Word, Pages, TextEdit, or namely, Keynote. Install it via:

cd ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles
git clone git://github.com/drnic/copy-as-rtf-tmbundle.git “Copy as RTF.tmbundle”
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/mccm06/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/Copy as RTF.tmbundle/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 34, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (17/17), done.
remote: Total 34 (delta 14), reused 34 (delta 14)
Receiving objects: 100% (34/34), 6.88 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (14/14), done.

The copy:

And the paste:
  

IntelliJ: Copy as HTML Plugin

Similar functionality works from IntelliJ. Just install the plugin “Copy to Clipboard as HTML”.

The copy:

And, the paste:
  

I just finished watching several excellent presenters from a summary page of 10 video clips. Everyone should consider watching these to improve their talks in 2009. These are the superstars of this skillset and there’s so much to be learned from them.

The presentation skills of Benjamin Zander are absolutely amazing. He says so little, yet so much. He uses paper easels rather than PowerPoint and live demonstrations rather than canned demos. He works the audience and circulates amongst them. What an excellent example to aspire to.