As of recent versions, Notational Velocity and nvALT have a URL handler for nv:// (or nvalt://). Using the /find/ parameter allows you to initiate a search in NV from a link, e.g. nv://find/abnote%3AJohnny Appleseed. If you use a unique prefix and full name, you can pinpoint a single note without having to create a file or locate the note’s ID. The first time you click the link, it will open a search in NV, and pressing Return will create the note and begin editing. Once the note is there, it will locate it instantly the next time you click the link.

I’m using the prefix “abnote:” on my notes. This AppleScript will create the URL entry automatically from the selected entries’ first and last names, and you can edit the prefix in the script to be anything you like. Just save it as “Add NV Note.scpt” in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Address Book and it will show up in your script menu² when you’re in Address Book. You can run it on a bunch of entries (it’s not optimized to run on an entire large address book, though), or one at a time as you need it.

I wrote this on Lion. I honestly have no idea if it works on anything earlier. It might³.

The script

tell application "Address Book"
	set thePeople to the selection
	repeat with thisPerson in thePeople
		set theName to name of thisPerson as string
		make new url at end of urls of thisPerson with properties {label:"NV Note", value:"nv://find/abnote%3A" & theName}
	end repeat
	save
end tell

Related posts:

1. Address Book search and Skype from the command line
2. nvALT 2.1 in the wild
3. iOS App Review: Reading List

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Connecting nvALT and Address Book

For the command line savvy, the gist has been updated as well. Run it with “-h” to see all of the options. There’s even a progress bar in the terminal (default setting).

The big news, though, is that I have this working within Marked. The next version will be able to accept dropped Scrivener projects and provide a compiled preview that updates with changes from Scrivener. No external application needed! That release should be ready relatively soon, I’m putting out a beta for testing this week.

For now, here’s the latest (and probably last) version of ScrivWatcher:

Related posts:

1. ScrivWatcher droplet, an easier live Scrivener preview
2. Preview a full Scrivener document in Marked, live
3. The second Marked giveaway!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at ScrivWatcher, one more time

My Tech Talk this morning, “40 Tips in 40 Minutes” with David Sparks and Merlin Mann went really well, I think. I had fun doing it, anyway. I put up some show notes at the soon-to-change 40tips.com, if you’re interested. I’m looking forward to seeing David and Merlin with Rob Corddry tomorrow. If you’re around Macworld, you should probably get there early!

Lunch with Shawn Blanc, Stephen Hackett, Brett Kelly, Ben Brooks, and Thomas Brand was awesome¹. Great to meet so many cool people all at once.

I just got back from a clandestine meeting at the Samovar Tea Lounge (I love that place). I had tea. We had laughs. I was shown software. It was amazing. I will pimp the hell out of it when it comes out in the next couple of months. Until then, all I can say is just prepare to have core elements of your workflow change drastically, for the better. That’s the second game-changer I’ve been shown lately but can’t disclose yet. I will go insane if this keeps happening.

Also, if you are in San Francisco right now, swing down to Jillian’s tonight before 11pm and catch up with the TUAW crew. It’s going to be a good time. Low-key, good conversation, and probably drink tickets.

Related posts:

1. On my way to Macworld ’11
2. Notational Velocity ALT 5.3
3. Speaking at Macworld

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at From my Macworld Diary

Just unzip the download below and put the app in your Applications folder (or wherever). Then drop a Scrivener project on it and it will open the compiled file as a Marked preview and start watching. You can also launch the application and you’ll get a droppable window that you can drag Scrivener projects to, or put it in your Dock for easy access.

Let me know how it works. If everything’s groovy, I’ll be adding this and some other updates to the Bonus Pack as soon as possible. I’ll probably try to get droplets for the MarsEdit, nvALT, etc. watchers working as well. I present at Macworld | iWorld at 10am today, so that’s going to have to wait while I rehearse!

Changelog

1.3

• Script detects whether it’s running on the command line or in the droplet. If it’s on the command line, adds progress bar support for caching and concatenating.

1.2

• Error catcher for some XML parsing issues on more complex document structures
• Rewrote the whole system to cache textutil conversions and only update when the rtf version is newer than the text version. It can now handle files with many sections much, much faster.
• Turned off headline generation from page titles by default. If you want it back, you can edit the script inside the app bundle and set titles_as_headers to true. I’ll try to build a more external configuration for it soon.

1.1

• Watches project XML file so changes to sorting and order update the preview as well
• Names preview files based on project name to avoid overwriting other open previews
• Opens dragged document in Scrivener if it’s not already open

Related posts:

1. Preview a full Scrivener document in Marked, live
2. ScrivWatcher, one more time
3. Marked scripts: nvALT, Evernote, MarsEdit, Scrivener

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at ScrivWatcher droplet, an easier live Scrivener preview

I took the script and ran with it this morning, switching it over to REXML parsing and adding in titles for sections and pages. The original script broke on a couple of my projects, but the recursive XML handler I set up fixes the issue.

To run it, you just need to save the script on your drive and make it executable (chmod a+x /path/to/scrivwatcher.rb). Then you can run /path/to/scrivwatcher.rb /path/to/YourProject.scriv. Marked will open automatically and changes will be reflected every time you save. To stop the script, you need to type Control-c in the terminal window you ran it from.

I’m going to try to wrap this into a droplet that you can just drop a Scrivener project on and launch both Scrivener and Marked with scrivwatcher syncing the two. Once I’ve determined whether that’s win or fail, I’ll update the Marked Bonus Pack with it. Yes, I will eventually find time to build this functionality into Marked, along with the rest of the Bonus Pack scripts.

The script is currently a gist on GitHub if you want to play with it. I’ll be updating the gist as I have time to clean it up and make a few things (much) more elegant. If you want to fork and help me out, it’s always appreciated!

Related posts:

1. ScrivWatcher droplet, an easier live Scrivener preview
2. ScrivWatcher, one more time
3. Marked scripts: nvALT, Evernote, MarsEdit, Scrivener

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Preview a full Scrivener document in Marked, live

• Magnus iPad stand
  Via Justin Blanton, a new item for my wishlist.
• A better Photoshop grid for responsive web design
  Elliot Jay Stocks gives us an awesome Photoshop template for a responsive web design layout.
• filmgirl/TextMate-Themes
  Christina Warren’s TextMate theme compliation (they work with Sublime Text 2, as well). Some classics and some greats. Some previews can be seen here.
• Git Todo
  This is great. I plan to incorporate it with my prompt_command to work like na, but I love the simplicity.
• codr.cc
  Awesome little pastebin with live code editing/viewing capabilities. It uses CodeMirror extensions for various languages and provides public, read-only viewing urls. Cool stuff.

Related posts:

1. New Safari Extensions give good source
2. iOS-inspired popup box CSS
3. Web excursions: August 9, 2011 — August 12, 2011

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Web excursions: January 20, 2012 — January 24, 2012

I get a lot of one-off requests for scripts and tips on how to handle tasks specific to people’s workflow or writing style. I generally keep myself pretty busy, so I usually reply with a quick idea or thought and leave it up to them to run with it. David Coleman emailed me this morning, though, with a request that struck me as an interesting enough idea to whip up a script before work.

What David wanted to do was take the idea behind my “Inline Links to References” command in the Markdown Service Tools and do something similar for footnotes, allowing him to write footnotes inline in a paragraph and have them converted before processing with MultiMarkdown. It’s not such a chore to skip a few lines and drop in the footnote syntax that this should be part of the spec, but it is something I would find handy in several situations. So…

The format I picked uses a syntax like this to denote a footnote:

This is the regular text(*This is the footnote*), and you can drop the footnote in at any point.

The Service can handle footnotes inside of lines, at the end of lines, spanning multiple lines with breaks (creates paragraphs) and does fine with Markdown within the footnote. One nice thing about this syntax is that–if you’re previewing as you write–it italicizes the output to differentiate it until you’ve used the service to move it out of the main text.

Multi-line footnotes need to begin at the end of a line of text, and just use double-newlines to separate paragraphs within the footnote, e.g.:

...the end of the paragraph. (*This is a footnote

which is going to span

more than one line*)

Here’s the script, also available as a Service download at the end of the post.

Update: I just added a fix (in code below and the Service download) for making sure that footnote reference titles aren’t duplicated if you have existing MultiMarkdown-formatted footnotes in the document.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
 
def e_sh(str)
	str.to_s.gsub(/(?=[^a-zA-Z0-9_.\/\-\x7F-\xFF\n])/n, '\\')
end
 
input = STDIN.read
 
footnotes = input.scan(/\(\*(.*?)\*\)/m)
existing = input.scan(/^\[\^fn(\d+)\]: /i)
counter = existing.empty? ? 1 : existing.uniq.sort[-1].join.to_i + 1
 
output = []
footnotes.each {|note| 
	output << {'orig' => note[0], 'title' => "fn#{counter}", 'footnote' => note[0] }
	counter += 1
}
 
o = []
output.each_with_index { |x,i| 
	o.push("[^#{x['title']}]: #{x['footnote'].gsub(/\n\n(\s*.)/,"\n\n\t\\1")}")
	input.gsub!(/\(\*#{e_sh x['orig']}\*\)/m,"[^#{x['title']}]")
}
puts input.strip + "\n\n#{o.join("\n\n")}\n"

I’m in San Francisco for an AOL Tech code jam right now, so I don’t have a lot of time to thoroughly test this. Please let me know about any bugs that need fixing.

If you’re in San Francisco and like coffee or beer, hit me up on Twitter. If you’re here for Macworld, then you’d better be at my “40 Tips in 40 Minutes” talk with David Sparks and Merlin Mann on Thursday!

Related posts:

1. A better System Service for Evernote clipping — with MultiMarkdown
2. Auto-convert your inline Markdown links to references
3. A System Service for to. url shortening

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at A Service for writing MultiMarkdown footnotes inline

Anyway, I polished them up a little and threw up a GitHub page for them. If you’re a web designer and you’re looking for an iOS-like popup style, they might be of use to you. You can see the demo, the markup and classes and download the CSS (and minified version) at http://ttscoff.github.com/popupsCSS/.

Late “I-forgot-to-mention” addendum: These styles were developed primarily with Marked in mind, meaning there are no non-webkit vendor prefixes I guess I put in prefixless and moz versions in my sleep again and they are not at all cross-browser tested. I’ll put up a more complete version when I get a chance. If you take matters into your own hands, please fork on github or send me your updates for inclusion!

Related posts:

1. Title track: Something Precious
2. Pinboard redesign experiment
3. TextMate drag command for Base64 encoding images

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at iOS-inspired popup box CSS

Dayone uses a very simple XML format in separate files to store your entries. It’s easy to replicate the structure using a script, allowing you to directly generating your own Day One entries from any part of your workflow. I’m bypassing the dayone CLI and dropping the updates in directly for added flexibility. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love that Day One comes with a CLI, I just wanted to experiment around it.

I’m using the new iCloud support for sync, and this Service is built to work with that folder structure by default. The version below (and in the download) looks in “~/Library/Mobile Documents/” (where iCloud stores documents) for a folder containing the word “dayoneapp.” I don’t know offhand what the bizarre names of the folders indicate, but they differ between accounts, so we have to grep out the matching folder. Assuming your Journal is called Journal_dayone (default) and you’re using iCloud, you shouldn’t have to edit anything. If it doesn’t work, run this in Terminal and copy the resulting path into the “dayonepath” variable:

find ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/ -name "Journal_dayone"

If you’re using Dropbox, you’ll just need to make a minor alteration to the “dayonepath” variable. Delete the line starting with “dayonedir” and hardcode the Unix (POSIX) path to the “entries” folder, located directly inside of the Journal.dayone bundle in your Dropbox root folder. It will most likely be /Users/[yourusername]/Dropbox/Journal.dayone/entries/ if you haven’t changed any defaults in Dropbox or Day One.

The service itself is available for download at the end of the post, or you can take the script below and home-roll your own in Automator. It should work out of the box, no need for ruby gems or symlinked CLIs.

The only configuration you may want to edit is the “starred” variable. This defaults to off because Services aren’t interactive and you probably don’t want to star every entry you clip. If you do, though, just change “starred = false” to “starred = true” and it will make your calendar look like a planetarium.

The Service will use /usr/bin/textutil to strip out any rich text artifacts. I’m not certain this is necessary, but I found that when clipping rich text I would lose all of my line breaks and indents. This seems to solve it. The script also looks for text with hard breaks and handles them Github-style, preserving breaks using Markdown line break syntax.

If you have Growl running, you’ll get a notification. To be polite, it checks for Growl before attempting any notifications. The check can be slow sometimes, though, so you may want to either remove the check if you always have Growl running, or remove the whole Growl section at the end if you don’t.

The script:

Here’s the script. The same script can be found in the Service download at the end by opening the .workflow file in Automator. You can easily customize/edit from there, so this is posted just for reference.

require 'time'
require 'erb'
 
def e_sh(str)
	str.to_s.gsub(/(?=[^a-zA-Z0-9_.\/\-\x7F-\xFF\n])/n, '\\').gsub(/\n/, "'\n'").sub(/^$/, "''")
end
 
input = STDIN.read
entrytext = %x{echo #{e_sh input}|textutil -stdin -convert txt -stdout}
entrytext.gsub!(/\n([^\n])/,"    \n\\1")
uuid = %x{uuidgen}.gsub(/-/,'').strip
datestamp = Time.now.utc.iso8601
starred = false
 
dayonedir = %x{ls ~/Library/Mobile\\ Documents/|grep dayoneapp}.strip
dayonepath = "~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/#{dayonedir}/Documents/Journal_dayone/entries/"
 
template = ERB.new <<-XMLTEMPLATE
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Creation Date</key>
	<date><%= datestamp %></date>
	<key>Entry Text</key>
	<string><![CDATA[<%= entrytext %>]]></string>
	<key>Starred</key>
	<<%= starred %>/>
	<key>UUID</key>
	<string><%= uuid %></string>
</dict>
</plist>
XMLTEMPLATE
 
fh = File.new(File.expand_path(dayonepath+uuid+".doentry"),'w+')
fh.puts template.result(binding)
fh.close
 
growl_running = %x{osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to return (count of (every process whose bundle identifier is "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp")) > 0'}
 
if growl_running
  %x{osascript -e 'tell application id "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp" to register as application "Clip to Day One" all notifications {"Clip Complete"} default notifications {"Clip Complete"} icon of application "Day One"'}
  %x{osascript -e 'tell application id "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp" to notify with name "Clip Complete" title "Log to Day One" description "Clipped to Day One" application name "Clip to Day One"'}
end

Side note: I mentioned to @brianstucki that this Service might contain the necessary ingredients for an Evernote-to-Day-One solution, but I’ve realized it’s really only the last part of the equation. What you’d probably want to do with most RTF/text notes is export HTML, extract the “created on” meta and parse it into the correct date format, then pipe the rest of the contents through markdownify_cli.php, passing the result to dayone new. Then you’ll have nice, Markdown versions of your notes from Evernote, preserving much of the formatting. I tested this, and it works pretty flawlessly for text notes.

Download

For complete instructions on installing the service (and adding a keyboard shortcut for it), see the how-to posted here.

Related posts:

1. Quick Tip: Quickly clear stuck Growl notifications
2. A System Service for to. url shortening
3. Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at System Service: Clip to Day One

Day One is a gorgeous app for keeping a personal journal. I discovered it, if I recall correctly, via David Sparks. It has iOS companion apps and iCloud syncing. It also has excellent search capabilities, likes MultiMarkdown and can export my entries to plain text at any time. I like it because it’s good-looking and concise; just what I need, with no feature bloat. Plus, it’s specifically designed to do exactly what I want: keep a timestamped journal of what I’m working on, have accomplished or have just discovered in my digital travels.

Day One already has a quick entry palette in the menubar. It also has a command line interface (/usr/local/bin/dayone)¹ which provides some geeky options (try dayone in Terminal) and the flexibility needed to replace my current logging system. You can create entries quickly with either method, but I wanted just a little bit more out of it. I built a quick script which allows a basic syntax for starring entries and defining dates (using natural language) inline in the entry itself. It can be used from the command line, from LaunchBar (or similar) and can be incorporated into just about any scriptable workflow.

The natural language portion of the script is built on the “Chronic” Ruby gem, so running this script as is requires that you have that installed. If you don’t have it available, just run gem install chronic to add the gem. If you run into errors doing that, try sudo gem install chronic and provide your system password. Here’s the script, complete with some explanation in the comments.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
 
# logtodayone.rb
# Brett Terpstra (http://brettterpstra.com)
# Use and modify freely, attribution appreciated
# 
# This script works with the Day One[1] command line utility
# It parses an input string for an exclamation point prefix to mark starred
# and/or a [date string] at the beginning to parse natural language dates
# 
# Requirements:
# Chronic ruby gem
#
# Example usage:
# logtodayone.rb "! This is a starred entry."
# logtodayone.rb "[yesterday 3pm] Something I did yesterday at 3:00PM"
# logtodayone.rb "! [-2 1:30am] A starred entry about something I did two days ago"
 
require 'rubygems'
require 'chronic' # (`gem install chronic`)
 
if ARGV.length > 0
  input = ARGV.join(" ").strip
else
  print "Log entry: "
  input = gets.strip
end
 
# If the input starts with an exclamation point, make it starred
starred = input =~ /^!/ ? "true" : "false"
# remove the bang from the input string
input = input.gsub(/^!\s*/,'')
 
# if there's a [date] specified, parse it
if input =~ /^\[(.*?)\]/
  datestring = $1
  # if the date starts with -X, assume it means X days ago
  if datestring =~ /^\-(\d+)/
    datestring.sub!(/\-(\d+)/,"\\1 days ago ")
  end
  # Replace a single 'y' within the date brackets with "Yesterday" for parsing
  datestring.sub!(/\by\b/,'yesterday')
  # Parse the resulting date string with Chronic
  d = Chronic.parse(datestring, {:context => :past, :ambiguous_time_range => 8})
  d = DateTime.now if d.nil?
else
  # if no [date] specified, make it right now
  d = DateTime.now
end
date = d.strftime("%m/%d/%Y %l:%M%p") # dayone formatted
input = input.gsub(/^\[.*?\]\s*/,'') # remove [date] from input
 
%x{echo "#{input}"|/usr/local/bin/dayone -d="#{date}" -s=#{starred} new}

Some usage tips

You can star an entry by beginning it with an exclamation point. I’m not sure how I’ll use stars yet, but I figured the option was there, so I’d add a syntax for it.

I often end up logging things after the fact but before I forget what I was doing, so it’s important for me to be able to enter an approximate date and time for the sake of organization. Date strings are entered in square brackets at the beginning (or after an exclamation point) of the entry. The natural language accepts basic strings such as “yesterday 3pm” or “noon” and converts them to Day One-compatible dates. It also accepts “-X” operators to specify a number of days ago (I’m assuming I won’t be logging entries in the future). “y” by itself will be converted to “yesterday.” A typical entry for me would look like “[y 11:45pm] working on silly scripts for logging to Day One.” An entry with no exclamation point and no date brackets is just read as a normal entry at the current time.

I’m using generic @tags–a habit carried over from my VoodooPad scratchpad–to make my entries easily searchable by topic or project. Beyond that, I’m just relying on Day One’s built-in chronological organization and full-text search.

The script is all fine and good, but it’s not much use if it’s not convenient to access. Here are a few of the ways I’m making it universally accessible in my workflow.

Bash alias

First things first, lets make it really easy to log entries from the command line. A simple alias in your ~/.bash_profile shortens things up:

alias log="~/scripts/logtodayone.rb"

Now you can make an entry with log "the thing I was just doing".

LaunchBar Action

Given that few of us are always on the command line, it would be nice to access the script easily from other utility apps. I personally use LaunchBar, but you can create similar scripts for Alfred, Quicksilver, etc. If you use LaunchBar, you can just save the three-line script below as Log to Day One.scpt in ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Actions:

on handle_string(message)
  do shell script "/Users/ttscoff/scripts/logtodayone.rb \"" & message & "\""
end handle_string

Now, just pop up LaunchBar and type ldo or similar to select the action, then type space to get a text field where you can type your log entry. The script syntax applies in full, so start with an exclamation point to star the entry, and use natural language date syntax between square brackets to specify a date, if needed.

Git commit wrapper

I do something similar to this with an nvALT note, so I thought I’d try it with Day One for a while. It’s a basic bash function to copy a note from a git commit into my daily log. It just wraps git -am (commit all, message), so more complex commit commands won’t work. It covers 90% of the commits I’d actually want in my journal, though.

function cdo(){
  msg=$*
  path=$(pwd)
  ~/scripts/logtodayone.rb "@${path##*/} $msg"
  git commit -am "$msg"
}

Update: I made the git wrapper significantly smarter, thanks to a little assist from @nnutter. It basically parses up your git tree for the actual repo name instead of using the directory name you’re currently in.

# experimental wrapper for git to log commits to Day One
# lots of credit to http://nnutter.com/2012/01/git-todo/
function cdo(){
  msg=$*
  GIT_DIR=$(git rev-parse --git-dir)
  if ! (( $? )); then
      GIT_DIR=$(echo "$GIT_DIR" | awk -F/ '{nlast = NF -1;print $nlast}')
      if [ -z "$GIT_DIR" ]; then
                path=$(pwd)
                GIT_DIR=${path##*/}
      fi
            ~/scripts/logtodayone.rb "@$GIT_DIR $msg"
  fi

  git commit -am "$msg"
}

So that’s my fiddling for the evening. Back to doing something more useful (like preparing for my Macworld | iWorld talk with Merlin Mann and David Sparks).

Related posts:

1. System Service: Clip to Day One
2. VoodooPad log navigation plugins
3. Scatterbrains 2: The geekening

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Logging with Day One, geek style

• Profiling CSS for fun and profit. Optimization notes.
  Some interesting results from testing and profiling browser performance with CSS3 properties and transforms.
• Getting away from CES 2012
  A few of my favorite moments not on the CES show floor in Vegas.
• Twitter Bootstrap Generator
  “Kick-start your Twitter Bootstrap project the way you want.”
• Interesting –webkit CSS Properties
  Wow, I knew there were some great properties in webkit, but these could prove to be spectacularly useful, especially in mobile applications
• MASHA
  A rather nifty script you can run on your site which lets you mark points of interest on a page and receive a link you can send. When someone follows that link, your selected text is highlighted and scrolled to.

Related posts:

1. Auto-link text service updated
2. My weather report. Seriously.
3. Catching Markdown mistakes

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Web excursions: January 4, 2012 — January 15, 2012

I wanted to share a handy tool that I realized I use daily but rarely talk about. I call it Read2Text, but it’s really just a Frankenstein script which combines Python Readability (license) with html2text (license). The combination allows you to grab web pages, process them with a port of Arc90’s Readability and convert the HTML to Markdown, ready for pasting or piping to a text file.

nvALT has this built in, but it’s been a little crashy lately. I find it more reliable to just do this from the command line. If you install it in your path (both the read2text script and the “readability” folder), you can run read2text http://brettterpstra.com/keybinding-madness/ | pbcopy.

You’ll get a Markdown-ified version of the page, with links, image links, headers, code blocks and text intact, but no comments, sidebars, ads, etc. It’s not perfect, but it does a solid job and cleanup only takes me a minute, even on huge sites. I use this most of the time instead of clipping to Evernote these days.

I alias it in my .bash_profile to rtt, and often redirect the output straight to a text file in my nvALT folder: rtt http://grml.org/zsh/zsh-lovers.html > ~/Dropbox/Notes/nvALT2.1/zsh\ lovers.md

Now I have a new note that automatically shows up in nvALT with the text of the zsh-lovers page (yeah, I tried switching to zsh this morning. I’ll have to come back to that). Anyway, I thought others might find this hack of use, so I’m making the download available below.

By the way, I also have a web service for this. You can get raw markdown or a nice interface for previewing and copying. There’s also an API and bookmarklets for integration into your favorite browser. Have fun!

Related posts:

1. Meet Marky, the Markdownifier
2. nvALT 1.0.8 progress
3. Clippable

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Scripting Readability and Markdownify for clipping web pages

• skratchdot/github-code-search.user.js
  A very handy userscript that adds a per-repo search box to GitHub pages. Also led me to discover NinjaKit.
• Fullscreen Background Image Slideshow with CSS3
  Pretty sweet.
• Code Highlighting and Marked Preview Styles in nvALT
  This works really, really well. Thanks Chris!
• impress.js | presentation tool based on the power of CSS3 transforms and transitions in modern browsers | by Bartek Szopka @bartaz
  Via Mr. jxpx777, the coolest CSS3/JavaScript presentation I’ve ever seen.
• robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
  Via @ryur, an intriguing framework for zsh configuration management. Now I just have to make the switch to zsh.
• themeleon :: Twitter Profile Designer
  This is among the most dangerous tools on the Internet.

Related posts:

1. Web excursions: August 9, 2011 — August 12, 2011
2. Speaking at Macworld
3. Prefixr OS X Service

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Web excursions: December 27, 2011 — January 3, 2012

I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite apps from 2011. I wrote a TextMate command to link all of these¹ (60+ links in four minutes!), so if you spot any misfire links that I missed, let me know in the comments. This isn’t an all-inclusive list (despite its length), but it’s a good chance to highlight some gems that may have passed under the radar of the big sites.

No fancy awards here, just a grateful mention of apps that make my life better. Glaring ommisions (like the unbeatable 1Password) are only because I assume you’ve already heard of them. Absolutely no slight intended to anyone not on this list. Well, except for a few. You know who you are.

Graphics/Design

• Skitch — My favorite way to quickly communicate screen-based information with annotations.
• flickery — The best Flickr experience I’ve found.
• Acorn — I rarely open Photoshop these days. Acorn suits my needs beautifully and is super-fast.
• AppControls — Great little GUI for creating CSS3 buttons.
• Carousel — Instagram when you’re not on your phone.
• ColorSchemer Studio 2 — I love this app.
• Gradient — This new app is awesome, and is only going to get better.
• Icon Slate — The best way I’ve found to quickly create ICNS files for Mac apps.
• Pochade — A great toolbar color picker for when you need a color fast. HSB, RGB(A), NSColor, UIColor and more at the click of a button.

Developer

• AppStar — Selling anything on the App Store? This is an amazing tool for tracking sales, rankings, ratings and more.
• TextMate — With v2 running now, I can safely say it’s doubtful I’m switching away any time soon.
• Espresso — Espresso fulfills a different need than TextMate for me: HTML editing with a more robust live preview, CSS X-Ray and prettier remote project handling.
• CodeRunner — Great app for developers in almost any language.
• HTTP Client — Todd Ditchendorf’s tool for working with REST APIs. Simple, effective and very handy.
• Kaleidoscope — One of the prettiest diff tools I’ve ever seen. Missing built-in merge, but it does do image diffs.
• iTerm — Makes me love my terminal even more. Split screens, tabs, awesome keyboard-based text selection and tons more.
• RegExRX — I love Patterns, but when I need submatches and more extensive highlighting, I go here. Hopefully Patterns will catch up on that front soon.

Utilities

• MailTags — Yes, I still use Mail.app. This–and Mail Act-on–are why.
• MailPluginFix — When Apple updates Mail, everything goes to hell. Easily fixed from the Terminal, but even easier with MailPluginFix.
• Apptivate — I started using this in 2011 and am completely in love with it. It’s not just a hotkey launcher, it handles key sequences as well. Infinite combinations.
• Arq — My offsite backup system of choice. It uses S3 and has the best recovery capabilities I’ve seen.
• BetterTouchTool — I keep trying to get along without this (to free up resources and reduce conflicts), but I can’t. I can’t quit you, BetterTouchTool.
• Cocktail — My favorite system maintenance tool. Solid and regularly updated.
• Delibar — I love Pinboard, and I loved it before Delibar. I love it even more now.
• Droplr — Droplr released version 2.0 of their Mac client this year, with plugins and great preview features. Handles Markdown notes, too, with Syntax highlighting in the notes panel.
• Dropzone — I may have professed my love of this utility recently.
• Fluid — As I invest more and more heavily in the cloud, Fluid keeps me sane. Separate cookies, Userscripts and Userstyles, in addition to a ton of Todd’s mad science. It’s awesome.
• f.lux — It adjusts your screen color based on the time of day. Sounds silly, but run it for a while. You’ll miss it dearly when you turn it off.
• Growl — Seriously. One of the most indispensable Mac utilities got even better this year.
• GrowlVoice — After a long-awaited update, this is now by far my favorite interface to Google Voice.
• LaunchBar — You may dig Alfred, or even have snuck back to QuickSilver, but nothing has tempted me away from LaunchBar since I first gave it an honest try.
• myPhoneDesktop — It’s not the prettiest, but it’s an excellent and full-featured way to get information between your Mac and your iOS devices. URLs, pictures, text and more.
• Yoink — Path Finder Drop stack for the Finder. Love it.
• TotalFinder — Tabs, dual-pane windows and a few extra features. Finder should be like this by default.
• TextExpander — I can’t leave this off of any list. Unbelievably useful in everything I do on my computer (or iPhone/iPad).

Writing

• MultiMarkdown Composer — This year saw the release of Fletcher Penney’s (father of MultiMarkdown) editing app. It’s packed with power-tools for long-form MultiMarkdown editing.
• Byword — Serving a slightly different audience, Byword has become my favorite setting for getting writing done. It inspires me to start, and makes it easy to finish. Full Markdown feature set.
• Clarify — This new app from BlueMango is a highly-focused version of ScreenSteps (my favorite tool for building documentation). If you write screen-based documentation of any sort, check this out.
• Scrivener — Big update to Scrivener this year, and it’s an amazing writing tool (was before, better now). On the edge of feature bloat, but not there yet.
• MindNode Pro — I admit that I use Mindjet MindManager and MindMeister just as much as I use MindNode, but it’s still always impressed me as an elegant and affordable mind-mapping solution. Definitely worth mentioning.

Music

• Simplify — An awesome addon for the Spotify app. Desktop artwork, hotkey control… I even made a skin for it.
• LastHistory — Not new, and I don’t think it’s been updated for a while, but if you Scrobble to Last.fm, check this out.
• Musicality — Wrapper for Last.fm, Pandora and Grooveshark. I use it less now that I’m into Spotify, but it’s still a great app. Keyboard shortcuts, Growl track notifications, and cross-service scrobbling.

Video

• Permute — This is one of the best GUIs I’ve found for video conversion. Simple, fast and high-quality output.
• iStopMotion — So much fun.
• ScreenFlow — The winner in the screencasting arena, at least for me.
• FotoMagico — This is another really cool app from Boinx. I don’t make a lot of slideshows, but when I do, this makes them awesome.

Productivity

• Raven — I haven’t actually gotten very far into this app yet, but I’ve played with it enough to know that it’s a highly-polished way to bring together a plethora of Single Site Browsers and keep everything in one place. It won’t kill Fluid, not for me, but it’s tasty.
• TaskPaper — Not my go-to task manager (even after a concerted effort), but I still use it daily for personal web/coding projects, and I love the plain-text approach to task management.
• Fantastical and QuickCal. It doesn’t matter which you choose, calendar entry has never been so easy. I’m hoping to have time to write up in-depth reviews of both soon.
• Reeder — It’s how I do RSS on my Mac. It’s gorgeous and–for the most part–very stable and fast. A couple quirks, and it seems to hate Flash, but I haven’t been tempted by anything else since I started using it.
• Tags — I talk about Tags all the time. It’s not under heavy development, but it’s never failed me.

Honorable Mentions

• Spout — Really cool way to view your Twitter stream. Highly distracting and resource-heavy, but pretty brilliant in its execution.
• Tunesque — An awesome way to search iTunes for any kind of media. I’ve mentioned it before.

Happy New Year! I’m excited to see what the Mac dev community comes up with in 2012!

Related posts:

1. Mac App Giveaway: Dropzone
2. Mac App Giveaway: Byword
3. Mac App Giveaway: PDFpen

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Some of my favorite Mac apps in 2011

Well, here it is: my last Geeklet post of 2011. I think it’s the simplest Geeklet I have, but it’s kind of fun. It uses the I ♥ Quotes API to put a random quote on your desktop.

There’s a variety of quote categories to choose from, ranging from geeky to humorous, religious to sci-fi. See the API page for a list and replace “literature” in the url with whatever you like. You can pull from multiple categories by separating them with a “+” in the url. There’s even a simpsons_chalkboard category to play with.

Here’s the one-line command that you can stick right into the Geeklet/Nerdlet without worrying about a shell script (Updated: I added some more awk fun to the end to rewrap the output while preserving the break before a “– Author” attribution):

curl -s 'http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random?max_lines=5&source=literature+macintosh'| \
grep -v "http://iheartquotes"| \
sed -e 's/\&/\&/g'|sed -e 's/"//g'| \
awk '{printf "%s ",$0} END {print ""}'|awk -F"--" -v OFS="\n\n—" ' $1=$1'

You should remove the “\” and newline at the end of each line (putting it all on one single line).

The first part (before the first pipe) just uses curl to grab a random quote from the “literature” section of the Quotes site (the -s makes it operate “silently” with no additional feedback). The url query parameters limit the quotes to a maximum of two five¹ lines, just to maintain a somewhat consistent length and make it easier to set up fonts and styles. The result of the API call is sent to grep -v to remove the credit line at the end of the response, and then on to sed for a little typographic cleanup (replace quote entities and convert double hyphens to an em dash). The two awk statements at the end will first remove any line breaks, and then, if there’s a double-hyphen (which almost always means an attribution line in these API responses), it adds a double newline and converts that to an em dash².

Have fun with it, and have a Happy New Year!

Related posts:

1. Geeklet: 1-minute average CPU load
2. Geeklet: Top RAM Processes
3. Geeklet: Top CPU processes

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Desktop Quotes Geeklet