What’s more odd to me, is that Apple has dropped the PyObjC support but gave AppleScript a giant boost with Cocoa-AppleScript. Don’t get me wrong, I like AppleScript fine, but it sure isn’t as flexible as Python or Ruby[1].
Anyway, if your thinking about making any AppleScript-Cocoa projects, here’s a very good tutorial over at MacScripter.
UPDATE: There are also great resources over at MacAutomation.com, including what looks like a good book.
Junecloud makes the terrific Delivery Status widget and Delivery Status Touch for iOS. If you do a lot of package tracking, these are the best tools available.
But I noticed that they also provide a free set of Automator actions that are very handy.
Good stuff.
A funny thing happened when I was reading through references for Python on OS X. Dr.Drang had a link to Apple’s Scripting Bridge page. The funny part is that Apple appears to now redirect that page to the Automator page. It doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in learning the Scripting Bridge.
AppleScript is easy for most basic file manipulations on the Mac. For example, I can get a files modification timestamp with the following bit of AppleScript:
where “this_item” is a reference to a file. “modificationDate” now contains a value like “Wednesday, December 21, 2011 7:24:22 PM”
But that’s a pretty awkward timestamp if I want to use it to name a file. In AppleScript, reformatting a timestamp is awkward and tedious. I often resort to other options. I have two preferred methods.
AppleScript -> Shell
Embeding a bit of shell script into AppleScript is easy. Here’s an AppleScript handler that takes a date like the one above and returns a nicely formatting compact timestamp
where “AS_Date” is the native AppleScript timestamp. This works, but it’s not very universal. The AS_Date must always be in the format of ”Wednesday, December 21, 2011 7:24:22 PM” or the script will throw an error.
So I have another bit of AppleScript that relies on Python to do the hard bit of parsing a date and returning a formatted timestamp
AppleScript -> Shell -> Python
That’s right, AppleScript runs a shell command, which in turn calls the Python processor. Now that Python is running within the AppleScript, I have access to some of the best date and time libraries around. Specifically, the dateutil never disappoints.
In this case, the AppleScript handler can accept any kind of date without knowledge of the format. It can then process the date and return a timestamp in my preferred format. For example all of the following dates will give the same timestamp:
If I wanted to get really fancy, I could also use parsedatetime to accept even more awkward date formats and return a specific timestamp. No need to go crazy though.
There’s some very high quality AppleScript functions and tools on Brati’s Lover. Just look at this nicely compiled list of file handlers. The site is worth a visit just for the cute Mac-like design.
This might make the bash people out there smile a little bit. If you love the push and pop functions on unix, this pair of macros bring both to the OS X Finder.
The core of each macro is an AppleScript, so these could easily be ported to LaunchBar or Alfred.
The Push macro grabs the currently viewed folder path and saves it to a Keyboard Maestro macro.
This macro reads the variable saved from the Push macro and then executes an AppleScript to open the Finder location
These macros live on my Finder palette in Keyboard Maestro.
If I’m working in a Finder window that I may need to recall later, I hit ctrl-cmd-F to bring up my Finder palette for Keyboard Maestro. I then hit the 8 key for the “Push” macro.
Later, when my Finder windows are all out of order or closed completely, I hit ctrl-cmd-F and then the 9 key for the “Pop” macro. A shiny new Finder window is opened right to where I wanted it.
I was recently wasting some time playing with an idea. I wanted an easy and quick way to grab some text in any arbitrary application and pop over to MultiMarkdown Composer to do some editing. I also wanted a way to pop the text back into the original app when I was done.
You might be yelling at the screen right now telling me to just use the cmd-tab to switch back and paste the text. Don’t yell at me. What if I had quickly jumped to Safari to check a link, or looked for a contact or previous mail message? So much for the super quick cmd-tab application switcher.
Well, there’s an easy way to do this with Keyboard Maestro and it involves a bit of variable magic. So why not learn a little something about my favorite macro application?
This solution is two separate macros. The first macro grabs the text and the name of the application. The second macro takes the edited text and returns to the original app for insertion.
Set the variable “currentApp” to the currently running application name. Next, simulate cmd-A and cmd-C to get the text. The macro then switches to MultiMarkdown Composer and simulates cmd-N and cmd-V to create a new document and insert the text.
Now we’re done editing and looking up links and taking a break and playing AlphaBaby with our three year old. We want to send the text back to whatever application we were originally working in. Luckily, Keyboard Maestro variables persist across restarts and shutdowns, which is more than I can say about my memory.
The second macro performs a cmd-A and cmd-C to grab all of our polished text.[1] The trick is that bit of AppleScript in the middle.
This script accesses the Keyboard Maestro variable using the “process tokens” function provided by the Keyboard Maestro Engine. That allows access to any variable or token available in KM. The script then launches the application by name.
Finally, the macro does the cmd-A and cmd-V to insert the new text. Boom.
We’re done here.
This works from the preview window as well. ↩
A nice little script by Wolf Rentzsch for extracting actions from Omnifocus to plain text. Applescript may be showing its age, but it sure is readable. That script almost looks like instructions you would provide to a person to perform the same action.
I really like Dr. Drang’s method of using sips for manipulating images. I set out to modify my FTP macro to include an image resize step. After a short bit of playing around I discovered that it’s very easy to manipulate images right in AppleScript. In fact, Apple provides services to add the necessary code to a script just by selecting the variable that points to an image.
Here’s the script:
tell application “Finder”
set this_item to get selection
set myPath to POSIX path of (this_item as text)
end tell
tell application “Image Events”
set this_image to open myPath
scale this_image to size 550
save this_image in myPath
close this_image
end tell
Here’s how easy it is. The first couple of lines just get the finder selection and places the path in a variable. Select that variable and right click.
Select the “Resize” script as shown. A window will pop-up asking for the desired size. That’s about it. Apple has made this very easy.
I modified my scratch file script. The new version appends the clipboard to the top of the file rather than the bottom. That way the scratch file is in chronological order.
WARNING: This script overwrites the contents of a file.
Just as a Unix reminder, the double angle bracket “>>” will append text to the end of another file. The single angle bracket “>” will create a new file or overwrite the existing content.
This new version of the script takes advantage of the hidden tmp directory on OSX to first store the contents of the clipboard. It then adds a new line char with the echo and finally writes the previous contents of the scratch file into the temporary file. It then overwrites the scratch file in my notes directory with the contents of the temporary file.
I keep a scratch file in my NVAlt library. I use it to keep random bits of information that I want to out live the clipboard. It’s not meant to be permanent just a stop-over to some other destination. My clipboard is pretty volatile since I have a number of macros and scripts that temporarily hold bits of information on the clipboard. If it’s something I might need later, then I better get it into something a bit more permanent. A scratch file is perfect for this.
The file is titled “qqq_Scratch.txt” after Merlin’s trick. I don’t have many files that start with “qqq” but a scratch file needs to be available as soon as I open my notes. I also pin the file to the top of my Simplenote list. So, yeah, I use it a lot.
I was pasting a bunch of info back and forth to it the other day and suddenly realized I could quickly make a macro to do the job. It’s really just a shell script:
The first echo command adds a newline to the end of the file. The second pbpaste command pipes the current clipboard entry to the end of the text file.
The first thing I did was make a new Keyboard Maestro macro out of this. It works perfectly. I also decided to make a LaunchBar action out of the command.
To create the LaunchBar action, I saved the above AppleScript to a folder I keep on Dropbox for LaunchBar scripts. It’s particularly easy to create AppleScripts for LaunchBar if you don’t need to pass parameters. I’ve created a custom list in the LaunchBar index where I manually add the scripts I create.
So to use this script from LaunchBar, I copy some text to the clipboard and then CMD-SPACE to access LaunchBar. Start typing the name of the script (Clipboard to Scratch) and hit return. Within a second, the clipboard contents (as long as it’s text) is appended to the end of the scratch file.
In the never-ending pursuit of hard-won laziness, I often develop scripts to do simple tasks. Sometimes the joy is in the problem solving and sometimes it’s in the final product. In this case it was in both.
Yesterday I was working on an as yet to be published post that has a large number of images. My typical workflow is to make an annotation in the text of the image I want to insert. I then transfer the html to MarsEdit and begin the image insertion process. I quickly decided that there had to be a better way to upload a bunch of images and grab their url at that same time.
Here’s what I came up with. It’s an AppleScript that uses Transmit to FTP the current Finder selections to my WordPress content directory for the current year and month and give back the exact url’s to the files. It’s not that pretty or efficient. What I like about it is how it shows just how flexible and powerful AppleScript can be. In one script, there is AppleScript doing most of the integration and basic logic, with a shell script to do some date conversion and finally python to perform the url encoding of the file name.
The following script could be triggered by FastScripts, Keyboard Maestro, LaunchBar or Alfred. That’s the real beauty of scripting on Mac OS.
There are a couple of assumptions for this script to work. First, you must have Transmit from Panic Software. If you need any kind of FTP access, quit messing around and go buy it.
Second, you need to save your ftp location as a favorite in Transmit. Using favorites in Transmit is nice, because you can have all of your login credentials securely handled by Transmit and omit them from an scripts you may publish to some silly blog.
No sooner do I post my Moom review and an update is released. New features:
Those are some nice additions to already great application. At this moment I think Moom is the best window management application available.
Here’s another quick macro that comes in handy. I often will create a list of items and later I will want the list to be in alphabetical or numerical order. I do it enough that I created a Keyboard Maestro macro for the function.
Given a list like this:
I can select the items, trigger the macro, and get back this list:
The real meat of the macro is an AppleScript that uses a single line of Shell Script to do the alphabetization. This also works great for ordered lists in Markdown as well.
I have been recently shifting a large chunk of my TextExpander snippets to Keyboard Maestro. I still plan to use TextExpander for basic snippet expansion but I find the depth of Keyboard Maestro allows me to build custom tailored tools that fit their intended uses much better.
For example, here a juiced up version of a snippet for inserting Markdown references from Safari. First, here’s what my TextExpander snippet did:
1. Copy URL from Safari
2. Switch to NVAlt
3. Bracket the link phrase
4. Type “mdr” to trigger the snippet
5. TextExpander inserts a double bracket then simulates the CMD-Down Arrow (bottom of document) and a return key. TextExpander then inserts “[%I]: %clipboard”
That’s pretty nice. It’s much better than manually creating link references. There’s still some tedium though. I have to copy the link in Safari. I have to add the link reference text and I don’t have a title for the link. Basically, there’s still some repetitive typing that doesn’t need to exist. I know I could fix a lot of this in TextExpander now that it supports AppleScript and Shell Scripts, but there are still some rough edges. Trust me, I’ve tried.
The Keyboard Maestro version simplifies the entire process. I browse in Safari to the page I want to reference. I jump back to whatever application I am working in (usually NVAlt). After I bracket the link phrase, I simply type “mdr” and Keyboard Maestro presents a pop-up window asking for the link tag.
The link tag is inserted with brackets and a reference is immediately added at the bottom of the document for whatever page is currently at front in Safari. It even grabs the page title for the link reference.
Believe it or not, this is a pretty simple macro. There’s a bit of AppleScript to get the URL and title (both scripts could be combined but I reuse these a lot in other macros) but overall, it’s basic Keyboard Maestro functionality. I have built a small arsenal of these little macros. While I would be completely lost working on someone else’s Mac, I take comfort in the ease at which I can work now.
You can download the macro file here.
I will be posting more of my macros as I clean up TextExpander and get my Keyboard Maestro macros in order.
