Posts in tutorials

Send Selected OmniFocus Task to Plain Text File

I save a lot of stuff into OmniFocus: bits of text, URLs, emails. I used to save favorite tweets into it, too. The app’s Quick Entry panel is so easy to invoke and so well-integrated with core parts of OS X  that, most of the time, I find myself clipping information that shouldn’t be into OmniFocus at all. However, I also find the process of manually going through that information beneficial to my workflow: it allows me to mentally and practically separate actionable items (tasks) from things to read and things to write (Instapaper material and my future articles, essentially).

I have created a simple AppleScript to send the selected OmniFocus task to a text file. The script is meant for how I use OmniFocus; hopefully you’ll find it useful as well. Feel free to modify it.

Typically, when I decide to go through my OmniFocus inbox, I find a lot of tasks that are actually ideas of things I want to do or write. Ideas don’t go into OmniFocus. Until those ideas become actionable items, I send them to a text file so I can elaborate on them and see if they can evolve. Like I said, most of the time those ideas are for new articles.

I store all my notes in a single Apps/ directory on my Dropbox. Based off the same AppleScript, I have created a Keyboard Maestro macro to create a new text file for each processed task; this is for ideas I know will turn out to be single, standalone articles. For ideas I’m not so sure about, I prefer to append them as text to an Ideas.txt file I keep in Dropbox as an “everything bucket” for inspiration. Read more

Single Podcast Episodes, Huffduffer, and Podcast Apps

Last week I tweeted that developers of podcast apps should figure out a way to let users quickly add podcast episodes from anywhere. I am subscribed to less than 10 podcasts, and I listen to nearly each new episode of them. However, there’s been so much good stuff lately that I’ve found myself wanting to check out another podcast’s episode every once in a while. Maybe it’s an episode of a 5by5 show I’m not subscribed to, or an interview I’m interested in. How can I save these “single episodes” from any device?

Downcast, my podcast client of choice, comes with a “mark for streaming” functionality that lets you add a single episode to a temporary list you can go through later. But I wanted something more like Instapaper: I want to save an episode to a “for later” list I can access and listen to from any device, at any time. I want to be able to save an episode with the click of a button and forget about it – it has to be frictionless.

Huffduffer does just that. It is web service that lets you “Instapaper episodes”: it has a bookmarklet which lets you clip podcast pages and save them to a single list on your account, which, unfortunately, can’t be set to private (unless I’m not seeing a setting). It doesn’t bother me to have my profile public, but a private option is always welcome. You can tag episodes, browse other people’s profiles and tags, and check out popular episodes on the homepage.

The cool thing about Huffduffer is that your profile is, essentially, an RSS feed that you can add to any podcast app that supports RSS – which means basically every app nowadays. Adding your Huffduffer profile’s RSS feed as a podcast will enable you to listen to the episodes you’ve saved through the bookmarklet, as Huffduffer directly fetches the audio file of a webpage you save. In my tests, it worked perfectly with podcast pages from 5by5, 70Decibels, and Mule Radio.

To add an RSS feed in Downcast, simply choose Add Podcasts > Add Podcasts Manually; your Huffduffer feed will be added as a podcast with its own episodes. I’ve also found that refresh times are fast – as soon as you add an episode to Huffduffer, your RSS feed will be updated.

It is slightly more complicated with Apple’s Podcasts app. The app doesn’t have a visible “Add from RSS” button, but you can force it to add one by pasting the URL into the search field. The app will recognize the URL and ask you to subscribe.

Huffduffer is a niche tool that, for me, solves a recurring problem. I can now save episodes from any device without having to subscribe to an entire show if I’m just interested in a a single episode. If I had to nitpick, I’d say I’d like Huffduffer to offer higher-res (Retina-quality) artwork for its default image.

Check out Huffduffer here.

Automatically Send Articles From Reading List to Instapaper

Two days ago, Ben Brooks asked on App.net if anyone had come up with a way to share Safari Reading List items to Instapaper. His question made me realize that it would be a fun project to find out, so in my free time I put together a workflow that runs automatically and in the background on my Mac mini.

Please note, what follows is a raw experiment. I have tested it, and it works, but it’s far from stable. It uses GUI scripting in AppleScript to mark Reading List items as read, and it heavily depends on iCloud, which, unfortunately, is far from reliable when it comes to bookmark syncing. Nothing should happen to your bookmarks (the script simply “reads” them), but backups are recommended, as usual. Read more

A Better Way To Combine iPhone Screenshots with Keyboard Maestro

In May, in my coverage of Keyboard Maestro 5.3 I shared a macro to combine two iPhone screenshots in a single image through a keystroke:

For iPhone apps, I like to take two screenshots, place them side by side, and generate a single image. Until today, I had to manually drag the image out of Photo Stream (or use Scotty), resize them with Preview, create a new image in Acorn, drop the images in there, adjust their position, and save. I came to the point where the process took less than a minute, but still it required a manual and boring effort on my side. Enter Keyboard Maestro 5.3: I rename the images I need to use “1″ and “2″, respectively (“1″ goes on the left side); I tell Keyboard Maestro to run an Automator workflow to scale them; Keyboard Maestro creates a blank image in its clipboard, composites files 1 and 2 onto the image at a specific pixel position, and creates a new .png file on my desktop.

With the release of the iPhone 5, I updated the macro to include a version that would use the bigger resolution of the new device; however, the macro was still requiring two files named “1.png” and “2.png” to be available and selected in the Finder. While the process of manually renaming a file was allowing me to “control” the placement of the screenshots on the final image (1.png would end up on the left), I still received several requests to figure out a way to grab any image – not just those named “1” and “2”–  from the Finder.

Gabe Weatherhead of Macdrifter came up with a way to allow for such workflow, and he allowed me to share the macro here on MacStories. Read more

Visualize OmniFocus As iThoughts Map, OPML, Or Plain Text

iThoughts for OmniFocus

iThoughts for OmniFocus

A few weeks ago, Michael Schechter found a way to export an OmniFocus for Mac database to OPML to visualize it in mind-mapping apps like iThoughts and MindNode. In the post, he wrote that, however, he was reaching to the Mac community to see if anyone would be able to build a more powerful and reliable solution with filters, color options, and more control on the exported data. RobTrew picked up the task and, on the OmniGroup Forums, released an initial script to export from OmniFocus to OPML.

Then, yesterday, Rob released a new version of the script which adds native iThoughts support and plain text exporting options, as well as settings for colors, templates, and filters.

I tested Rob’s script with my OmniFocus database, and after several improvements he made to the script, I feel comfortable enough with linking to it here. Unlike other solutions, Rob’s script looks directly into the SQL OmniFocus database cache to get its data – quite a feat on its own. But there’s so much more the script can do if you start customizing it. Read more

iOS 6: Tips, Tricks & Hidden Features

Every time Apple releases an OS X or iOS update we enjoy giving our readers quality walk-throughs, feature guides and my favorite – tips and tricks. Every Apple power user can attest that shortcuts and knowing many of the little things is a fantastic way to improve the user experience. I enjoy discovering as many as I can so that I feel well-versed as an iOS user and can help friends and family when they are either troubleshooting or simply want to know how to do thing easier or faster. There’s so much fulfillment when you’re able to help someone and it’s also a great way to start a conversation with another Apple user. We uncovered most of these ourselves but this thread on the MacRumors forums site has a fantastic list as well.

More iOS 6 coverage here.

Read more

Moving From iPhoto To Dropbox

I like iPhoto on the Mac. The app’s interface sports Apple’s proverbial attention to polish and details, the Faces feature is nice, and I like the possibility to visualize photos on a map, just as I find Photo Stream very convenient for my blogging workflow. However, I realized that I don’t want to depend on iPhoto to store the photos that, twenty years from now, I’ll look back to as memories. I need my photos — moments captured as .jpeg files — to be photos, not a database. And at the same time, I need to be able to access them now from any device I have without having to worry about sync, apps, formats, and corrupted entries. I have decided to move all my photos from iPhoto to Dropbox.

This is something I have been thinking about for the past year. Do I want my photos to be stored inside someone else’s app? And if not, why not do the same for any other media I store on my computer? Should I also ditch Rdio and go back to neatly organized .mp3 files in the Finder?

I have come to the conclusion that photos are irreplaceable. Decades from now, I’ll probably be able to find a 2Pac record somewhere online or in a record store (will those still exist?). But not so with photos. If something — anything — happens to my photos, they’ll be gone forever. There won’t be anyone able to give me my memories back. Just as I do for text files — the words I write — I have chosen to store my photos — the things I experience — as .jpeg files, a format that should still be around for the foreseeable future. Read more

Create OmniFocus Tasks From Drafts, Scratch, Or Any Text Editor Through Dropbox

Back in October 2010, I posted a tutorial on how to add new tasks to OmniFocus or Things using Dropbox, AppleScript, and PlainText by Hog Bay Software. In June 2011, I wrote about more ways to add tasks to OmniFocus (my GTD app of choice), and noted how I had only “scratched the surface of what’s possible to do with OmniFocus and task creation”.

I decided to slightly revisit my workflow now that several “quick Dropbox note-taking apps” like Scratch and Drafts have come out. These apps are already integrated in my daily routine, but the following method works with any text editor, and, obviously, using Dropbox is recommended if you want to be able to create tasks from anywhere. Read more

Change Text Case With AppleScript

Last night, I was looking for a quick way to change a string of text from lowercase to Title Case, which is the format I use for headlines here at MacStories. Normally, I would recommend installing WordService by DEVONtechnologies, but that’s a system Service, and I don’t seem to be able to install those without logging out and back in (I didn’t want to log out).

As I’ve come to learn lately, when you’re looking for ways to automate your Mac, the solution has likely already been posted on MacScripter. Among all the possible combinations of AppleScript to change text to a particular case format, I like this one by forum member “kai”. Essentially, the script takes the someText property and transforms its text items through changeCase to four possible options: upper, lower, title, and sentence.

To customize the script to my needs, I set someText to get the contents of my clipboard, change the case, then turn the result over to the clipboard again. In this way, I can select any text, copy it (so the original version is available in ClipMenu’s history), change the case, and paste back. To run AppleScripts with a keyboard shortcut, I use either Keyboard Maestro or Alfred.

Check out the AppleScript here.