Archive for the ‘Mac’ Category
-
February 15th, 2010
Sometime back I posted an applescript to tweet news items in NetNewsWire to your twitter followers and seems like many people found it useful. I’m really glad that I could find some time today to make a few updates on the script.
New features
- Twitnews now saves your twitter login details to the keychain itself. The old script needed you to save your twitter login credentials to the system keychain manually. Now, it checks for the twitnews key in your keychain and if it does not exist, asks you for them and creates the key for you.
- Growl support.
- Checks character count is within 140 characters.
- Uses Tr.im URL shortener so that you can use Tr.im analytics feature if you use it.
I would however like to use Usable Keychain Scripting by Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, considering the problems faced by some users, which I blame Apple for their really bad implementation of Keychain Scripting. I tried using Daniel’s scripting definition but could not get it to work, probably it is not updated for Snow Leopard. I’m not sure about this, so if you have suggestions on how I can improve the script, please leave your comments.
Please download it here.
Usage
Unzip and drop it into ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Scripts. Now you can access the script from the scripts menu on NetNewsWire.
If you would like to assign a keyboard shortcut to the script, check this post.
What else ?
The script has been tested on 10.5 and 10.6, but still if you find it buggy, please let me know in the comments. Otherwise, I hope you find it useful.
The code is available at Github.
UPDATE: If you’d prefer to use Bit.ly URL shortener, the script has been updated by Sean to use Bit.ly for click tracking.
UPDATE: Tr.im has been shut down :( Please see this post for an updated script.
Tags: AppleScript, Mac, netnewswire, twitnews, twitter
Posted in AppleScript, Mac | 8 Comments »
-
February 8th, 2010
If you are reading this post on my blog using Readability, then you are probably gonna love this. For those, who have not heard about Readability, it is a nifty little tool by Arc90, which transforms a webpage or blog post you are looking at to something very friendly to your eyes, or just increases the ‘readability’ as the name implies. From day one, I’m in love with it. If you haven’t yet, go check it out.
Coming back to the post, I discovered this really nice tip that helps to get Readability installed on NetNewsWire (yeah, your favorite news reader), using Applescript. It is very useful because you probably read all your news subscriptions on your news reader. So here you go!
Hint: I recommend adding a shortcut to the script once you have set it up. See this post if you’d like to know how you can do that.
Tags: AppleScript, netnewswire
Posted in Mac | No Comments »
-
January 17th, 2010
If anyone of you is using Dropzone app, I’ve made a small script to post images to the fun blogging platform – Tumblr. If you haven’t used Dropzone, it is a very useful mac app that lets you easily drag and drop files to perform customizable actions on them. For example, to upload the file to remote destinations, like your own FTP servers, Flickr, Posterous, Twitpic to name a few. But it is not just limited to file uploads, other uses include zipping and emailing the files you drop on it, install mac apps easily, share code on Github Gist or Pastie etc. Smoking Apples has a good review on the app.
I mainly use it to quickly share screenshots I take while on work, and also to quickly share a file with someone else on my FTP server.
The very good point with Dropzone is that the developers have made it very easy to extend the app with its API. If you are fine doing away with Ruby, then you can build your own destination scripts. I’ve just tried my hand on it, with a simple script that uploads the dropped image to Tumblr. I tried both the Net::HTTP method and also using Curl. However, using Curl seems to be quite faster.
The code is at my fork of Aptonic’s user contributed scripts at Github.
I believe that this app has got great potential and hope to see more extended scripts in the future and also will try creating my own if I get the time.
Tags: Mac, ruby, tumblr
Posted in Mac, Programming | No Comments »
-
September 19th, 2009
Some time ago, I wrote an applescript ‘TwitNews‘ for posting link to news items to Twitter from NetNewsWire. Many people seemed to find it useful and I’m happy about it. Today morning I got an email about how he used Spark app to create a keyboard shortcut to use the script. That is really useful because you dont have to select TwitNews from the scripts menu anymore. Instead just hit the assigned keyboard shortcut. That really gives it a native feeling. Unfortunately, I could not get Spark to work. Instead I found that it is much easier to use Mac OS X inbuilt feature in System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts.
Just create a new keyboard shortcut with the Application as NetNewsWire, Menu title as ‘TwitNews’ if you haven’t renamed the script when you put it inside the scripts folder, and your desired keyboard shortcut. I chose ⌃T as it is the same shortcut with Safari140 which is a useful tool to post stuff to Twitter from Safari (if you didn’t know).
Thanks to Ian Tornay for the idea of keyboard shortcuts!
Tags: AppleScript, Mac, netnewswire, safari, twitnews, twitter
Posted in AppleScript, Mac | 6 Comments »
-
July 7th, 2009
Just came across this cool iPhone app called “Prowl” which pushes growl notifications on your mac to your iPhone. An awsome way of using push notifications introduced in iPhone OS 3.0. I knew this app was going to be useful that I finally made up my mind to jailbreak my device. Yes, I have an unlocked iPhone and somehow you need to hack it to activate push notifications.
A lot of mac apps I have come across uses growl and it has been an inevitable part of my mac setup. So, any growl notification you get on your mac gets routed to your iPhone. This means that you can set Tweetie on mac to growl when you have a mention or direct message, which is then routed to Prowl’s servers and onto your iPhone. Furthermore, you can configure to growl when you get new emails (GrowlMail), or when someone sends you a message on Adium – really useful so that you can know if someone messaged you on IM when you’re away from your mac.
Prowl lets you customize it by giving options like send to iPhone only if you are away from your mac for a certain amount of your time. Which is sensible, you really dont want to get push notified when you are in front of your mac. Prowl works with a Growl plugin and its iPhone app. You also need to register on their website to activate it.
Even tried this on EDGE and seems to work fine. But sometimes, there is a lag in pushing notifications which is not impressive. Also, after enabling push notifications, I found that the battery life has gradually decreased. But, I think this app is really worth it.
Tags: growl, jailbreak, prowl, push-notifications
Posted in Mac, iphone | No Comments »
|
