Let’s be honest, adding new URL’s to Pocket could be easier. One of its “annoyances” is that a user can only add new links by actually visiting a page. Sometimes, though, it would be nice to quickly add links from something like a link list, e.g. some podcast shownotes or the main YouTube page showing your subscriptions.
I made a macro recently which added links to Safari’s Reading List using a “clever” series of actions, but as it turned out, I completely forgot you can just ⇧-click a link to add to Reading List.
Unfortunately there’s nothing as convenient available for Pocket. … Until now!
The script I wrote is slightly modified. It doesn’t use properties. As far as I recall these are saved to a plist. I wouldn’t want my password to be saved to disk in the clear. Unfortunately scripting Keychain doesn’t work anymore.
Anyway, apart of that, there’s nothing magical happening in the macros. Only two pause actions for “safety”1 and a try wrapper around do shell script. You get a nice growl notification at the end telling you about success or failure.
Adjust the device trigger for your input device. I’m using my internal MacBook trackpad only.
I said good things about ABBYY’s products before. Their OCR technology is used in many applications. If you want to buy this software, now is the time.
rawk is a static site generator written in the bourne shell. it uses posix compliant syntax to support the maximum number of systems and requires only a markdown parser and the standard unix tools (grep and sed in particular).
An update for FCPX has been released today. You can guess, I’m ecstatic about it. The last release of Final Cut Pro X has been a while, this one has been in the making for about 6 months, so it’s packed with new stuff.
Philip Hodgetts, as always, has already published an informative article about this update. For me the most important ones are:
Improved Sharing with custom destinations.
Range based exports: These allow to bring a clip to another app, say, Motion.
Chapter markers are now built right into Final Cut, no need for Markers.app anymore.
Fast Freeze Frame: New option to add freeze frames, a small change, but an important one for screencasters.
Add a shortcut to iCloud documents to the Finder sidebar for easy access
I was just trying to add iCloud’s Mobile Documents folder to the Finder sidebar for easy access and was flummoxed that it can’t be added by drag & drop.
Apple tries to remove access to iCloud from the normal user as much as possible. You “feel” that when navigating Mobile Documents the ↑ (up) command doesn’t work properly, but back does. Don’t know where they’re going with this.
For the time being, you can still add iCloud to the sidebar by using the shortcut "Add to Sidebar (⌘T)” from the File menu.
Unfortunately I haven’t found out yet whether RSS subscriptions can be moved to a new address as easy as podcasts can move their addresses - at least when iTunes is used.
Actions is a pretty useful app for your iPad. It is basically a shortcut host for a Mac(/Windows PC?). You need to download a client app, then you can assign shortcuts to actions that will be executed on the Mac. Below is the video tour.
I give it a thumbs up, except two things I want to mention: the company name, and the music of the video tour1.
Why? What is this music supposed to mean for the audience? A powerful awesome app, introduced with a cute little Ukulele? Come on.
I actually know why. Licensing such a track is pretty cheap. Small indie devs can’t afford to buy the licensing rights from bigger musicians. The instrument is recorded easily, with cheap equipment and the musician can play it right from their heads, which means production costs of such a track are down as well (comparatively). This music is also just used for pretty much everything currently. You stick out from the masses of competitors by copycating their style. Ya, neither thought I. ↩
This one shortens the Terminal bit quite a bit. Thanks Lauri Ranta! Much appreciate the contribution. His version doesn’t allow to use “orange” (the typed out word) to set the label though. Here’s a merged version.
# Set Finder label color
label(){
if [ $# -lt 2 ]; then
echo "USAGE: label [0-7] file1 [file2] ..."
echo "Sets the Finder label (color) for files"
echo "Default colors:"
echo " 0 No color"
echo " 1 Orange"
echo " 2 Red"
echo " 3 Yellow"
echo " 4 Blue"
echo " 5 Purple"
echo " 6 Green"
echo " 7 Gray"
else
osascript - "$@" << EOF
on run argv
set labelIndex to (item 1 of argv as number)
repeat with i from 2 to (count of argv)
tell application "Finder"
set theFile to POSIX file (item i of argv) as alias
set label index of theFile to labelIndex
end tell
end repeat
end run
EOF
fi
}
Second, my Extensions had my test path still in them. I overlooked it and just now found out about it by going through the comments (which I do occasionally only). Reader Thieme Hennis provided a script that takes the Finder selection as input. Thanks, Thieme!
I’ve updated the extensions.
The free version of Mindmeister only supports a limited number of export formats. With a little workaround though, you can convert these mind maps easily to OPML.
Go to the Export dialog and select Document Outline as format. A Rich-Text Format document (.rtf) will be downloaded.
Now open the document and press ⇧⌘T (Make Plain Text). We have to do some manual work now. With the original mind map still open. Select the lines of text where a subnode will be and indent them. It is easier to search for the “headlines” and just select the lines between them. Make sure that only the main node isn’t indented.
Now select everything and press copy.
Go to MindNode. Open a new document and make sure that nothing is selected. Even better, delete everything so that the canvas is blank. Then type paste. If you had empty lines they will shop up as empty nodes. Just delete them.
I want to do us all a favor here. I’m going to stop posting media and marketing related stuff here and focus on technology, geekery and nerdery. I think this in the interest of most of my readers.
You can follow my screen casting related topics on zCasting 3000. I plan to have more media content there. Wish me luck.
Don't whine about QuickTime Pro's loss anymore with Flip Player
Flip4Mac 3 has been released. Its main new feature is not just the WMV encoder, much thought and energy has been put into the upgraded Flip Player.
Flip4Mac included its own media player for a while now, but it was never that useful. With Flip4Mac 3 this changes slightly.
When we look at the recent years, media pros regret the introduction of QuickTime X. Although QTX uses newer technology it also misses many features video editors have gotten used to with QuickTime or even QuickTime Pro.
Flip Player, and Flip Player Pro, tries to fill this gap now.
Here’s a list of it’s most compelling features in terms of media editing (only Player Pro and Studio/Studio Pro HD):
Navigate by using JKL navigation and Command/Period stepping
Slow-Motion playback
Scale, Crop, Rotate and Trim videos
Export media with templates:
Applications: iMovie, iPhoto, Final Cut Pro , Episode, ScreenFlow, and Wirecast
iPhone, iPad, iPod, iPhone (Ringtone), and Apple TV
ProRes for Final Cut Pro
Audio from sound and movie files to iPhone Ringtones
Windows Media from QuickTime files(Studio and Studio Pro HD)
Flip Player is $29. There’s a free version available of both components. (WMV playback for QuickTime apps and the separate player app.)
At a most basic level, JSON Designer provides an interface to visually create and dissemble JSON structures. The interface is attractive and easy to orient. It feels a lot like iThoughts HD but for JSON.
I’ve been in contact with our commerce provider, Share-it. They’ve agreed to remove the freemail restriction on my account. Purchase is now possible with any email address.
Turn off Notification Center while your working with Keyboard Maestro
I just added this action to my “For work” macro in Keyboard Maestro. The action disables Notification Center in Mountain Lion by ⌥-clicking its menubar icon.
Why did it take me this long to figure this out?
There’s also another action in the macro which launches an app (as example) you want to have open when working. In my case it’s Pauses which reminds me to take regular breaks.
Use a similar macro to turn Notification Center back on after work.
UPDATE: Chris Stone from the Keyboard Maestro mailing list help me to get this working properly. Thanks!
When someone buys the Hazel tutorial this is how the disk image looks like when mounted (bottom). I wanted to make this as close to a software purchase as possible. “Just click and drag to Applications.” As it turns out…media isn’t that straight forward.
You see an earlier version on top, but I found out that iTunes doesn’t import PDF metadata. This would have been great. I could have set author and document name in the PDF and when the customer drags it to iTunes it would get sorted automatically. It turns out though, that iTunes ignores pretty much all metadata. “Pretty much” meaning that only the filename will be preserved as name of song.1
I searched for ways to make the PDF show up in iTunes with metadata, but there was no answer to my problem. I didn’t want to make the E-book an ePub since there is no native ePub viewer on OS X. So I changed the disk image design. This time only giving a slight hint where the files will be located after import.
Not perfect, but delivering video + other media isn’t easy, because there’s always a problem when multiple media gets sent. That’s why we had these CD-ROM’s with menus in the 90’s. Remember those?
Rubber is a program whose purpose is to handle all tasks related to
the compilation of LaTeX documents. This includes compiling the
document itself, of course, enough times so that all references are
defined, and running BibTeX to manage bibliographic references.
Automatic execution of dvips to produce PostScript documents is also
included, as well as usage of pdfLaTeX to produce PDF documents.
I really like the idea of YouTube EDU. I guess geeks and nerds are the only people on the planet who squee with joy when they here the words “two hour lecture about physics and science”!
Windows Tip: Create custom project templates by setting up a bare bones project with settings you want and use File > Save As Template.
You can go much further than that on your Mac. I’m sharing my “Markdown export with titles” compile setting here. This is just a minor adjustment to a built-in setting, but the built-in one doesn’t include the titles of the documents. Normally you would like the document’s titles to appear in Markdown format, when exporting to Markdown. Just enable “Compile for: MultiMarkdown" and also enable all Title checkboxes under Formatting. I think that’s all that I changed. Then just click on Compile and you’ll get a Markdown document with all the document titles in the format:
pIpe is ifttt like library for websites/webservices linked to webservices/smartphones/desktops with advanced filters.
pIpe works with JSON-formatted sources and can send out notifications with Google Talk or Pushover. Not a self-hosted IFTTT replacement yet, then, but still handy.
I complained recently how much I would prefer to move away from Pocket as “later bucket”. As a proof of concept, I would like to see how I get by with Safari’s own Reading List.
The problem Reading List has is that it’s not as well integrated as, say, Pocket. Developers prefer to give sharing options to Pocket rather than offering a built-in solution. Apps like Downcast (on iOS) and Reeder (on OS X) show how to save articles to the reading list. Therefore it is possible.
Anyway, for now, there aren’t sharing options in most, so as a workaround I wrote a little AppleScript that searches for http:// and https:// links in email messages and adds them to Reading List.
Add it as Mail rule with the following conditions:
Now you can just add new links by adding +reading to your email address. This can be done with every email address. If your address is myaddress@gmail.com, then the reading address would be myaddress+reading@gmail.com.
Just add the address to Contacts and it’s going to be available on all devices in seconds.
Side Products
As I was figuring out how to solve this as easily as possible I found some neat things in Automator again.
Data detectors allow building rule to extract URLs off a text and process them with an AppleScript.
This can also be used in a Service (where the data detector part is a part of the input conditions):
There’s also a Mac OS X Hint solving the exact same problem, with a similar script solution, but rather scanty. The script is only recognizing entire paragraphs that http links only. My solution finds multiple URLs in one message. As long as they are separated by a whitespace they should be found.
Gridlover helps to find the right font size by adjusting three sliders for body size and a scale factor, basically. You can then export the CSS and use it for your own page.
