A macOS app to convert Keynote presentations to archivable web pages

Keynote Extractor is a small, mative utility for macOS to export Keynote slides to a web page.

I used to give a lot of presentations at community events. For a while SlideShare was the place to upload your deck and share it with the rest of the world. I liked to keep my slides rather minimal, with a Presentation Zen-inspired aesthetic. However, that meant when people viewed the presentation PDF on SlideShare, they wouldn’t really know what was presented.

I solved this for a while by adding lots of notes on my slides so people could figure out what the presentation was about (mind you, this was before full-on video presentation recordings were a big thing). However, that made the presentation ugly. All the hard work to make it beautiful was lost when every slide had a sticky note on top of it.

At one point I had the idea to leverage the presentation notes to be able to see slide content next to the actual slide. I was a heavy user of the presentation notes feature in Keynote, putting everything I was saying that slide in the little box. I figured that if somehow, I could get that content out of a Keynote file and onto a webpage, that could be a brilliant way to view a presentation after the fact: slide intact, context via the notes.

I got to work to build a conversion app that could take any Keynote file and convert it into a responsive website. Said website could then be uploaded to a web host to share the presentation online.

I tried to develop it myself but eventually had to outsource the work to a skilled macOS developer.

The result: Keynote Extractor, a macOS utility to export Keynote-based slides to a web page.