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Posts in tutorials

How To Export Notes from Yojimbo and Convert Them to .rtf

You know how much I love Yojimbo. It’s great information organizer for Mac OS X which lets you store all your data like text, photos and password in one big Library. I wrote a couple of posts about Yojimbo here and here, be sure to read them to get an overview of this amazing application.

Anyway, Yojimbo has one drawback: sync and export. The developers (BareBones Software) don’t seem to be willing to release an iPhone app anytime soon, so the only way to “sync” Yojimbo would be that of exporting the whole database to Dropbox and import it later on another machine. But still, this is not a real sync, nor ax export feature: you can’t view single items in the database.

So, I wrote an Automator workflow to export notes from Yojimbo and convert them to .rtf. It uses the textutil shell script (which should come by default on any Mac OS computer) and lets you view and edit all the notes you have in Yojimbo in external apps such as TextEdit. It has some limitations anyway, we’ll see them together.

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Applescripts for Quicksilver

Great page I’ve discovered tonight, user made Applescripts for Quicksilver. Here’s the link.

Just a few:

Copy to DropBox Public Folder

Create Path

EasyFind

Replace Text in Filename

Convert to Decimal/Hex/Oct

New Ruby Document

And with the latest beta release, QS is the king again.

How To: Launch Login Items Via Applescript and Avoid Login Delays

I stumbled upon this cool trick on MacOSXHints yesterday, and I believe it’s amazing: basically, it lets you open all your login items via applescript instead of saving them into your account Preferences. Many people reported issues with login items in Snow Leopard - me too - so this is just perfect.

Fire up Applescript editor and type:

tell application “Notify” to launch

delay3

Obviously, you can replace Notify with the app you like, be sure to write it between the quotes. Then, simply repeat those two strings for all your login items.

Here’s mine:

tell application “ClipMenu” to launch

delay 3

tell application “Caffeine” to launch

delay 3

tell application “Cloud” to launch

delay 3

tell application “Notify” to launch

delay 3

tell application “FastScripts” to launch

delay 3

Delay3 is useful for preventing the applications to launch at the same time. You can replace to launch with to activate if you’d like to bring the app to front.

And last, you can save the script as an application bundle and add it to your login items. But if you have problems with your login items (as I said before) you can put the app in your dock, or in a stack. It’s up to you.

How To Export Items From Shovebox Mobile and Import Them Into Yojimbo

Thanks to MacHeist, I had the chance to download and test Shovebox, a lightweight organizer for Mac OS X. Then, I found out that there was a Shovebox app for iPhone too, so I decided to give it a try. Expect a review soon.

Anyway, this is not a review of Shovebox mobile. In this tutorial I’ll show you how you can export items from Shovebox mobile and import them into Yojimbo on your Mac. As you can guess, Shovebox mobile + Yojimbo could become the ultimate data organizer setup: every data you shove on the go can be easily imported into Yojimbo on your desktop.

The process is a little bit complex and it’s based on an Automator workflow I created, but once you’ve set up everything it will take 2 seconds to export/import all the files.

Enjoy!

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How To Create a Lessn, Bit.ly, Is.gd, Tinyurl Desktop Shortener with Applescript

If you daily send a lot of links to your friends / Twitter followers it’s very likely that you’ve started using a URL shortener. It’s fast, easy and so web 2.0 to send a shortened URL, you can’t deny it. But as the url shortening mania exploded, so has the url shortening services: Tinyurl, Bit.ly, Tinyurl, Tr.im, Is.gd, J.mp, there are hundreds of shorteners out there.

Then, there’s the “your own URL shortener” trend: just as I did with mcstr.es, I purchased a short domain and installed lessn from Shaun Inman to generate short urls for MacStories links. Sure, lessn is not the only application which allows to acheive this (Yourls, for example, seems to be used by many people) but I like its interface and installation process more than others.

Now, if there’s one thing all these url shortening services miss it’s a desktop app to shorten links. I mean, an application that supports every service so that the users can choose which one to use.

For this reason I asked @andytuba (website) to build an Applescript for that.

And guess what, it’s awesome.

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Using Snow Leopard’s Built-in Text Snippets in Mail.app

Awesome tips from HawkWings about a Snow Leopard feature a very few users know: text substitution. You can actually enable text substitutions in Mac OS X by default instead of purchasing apps like TextEpander or Typinator. The problem is, not every Cocoa app supports them, so it’s very likely that you’ll end purchasing a third party app.

But anyway, if you’d like to enable them in Mail.app, it’s stupid simple.