Sure, I’ll click OK. Oh, I can’t….

It’s so important they told me twice.

Come on, this app is free? My credit card will be charged immediately?

I think Apple need to work on their AppStore error messages.

I’ve been getting into OmniFocus recently and wanted a way to view my tasks on my iPhone on the go. What better than the HTML export – but exporting a perspective and uploading the file was just taking too many clicks. The following applescript may help – point Automator at the created file using your uploader of choice and you’ll be set. The trick to exporting OmniFocus tasks lies in exporting a pre-made perspective and opening that ‘document’ to do the export with. So make yourself a perspective of what you’d like exported, save that, and use it in the AppleScript. I’m sure you can work it out.

tell application "OmniFocus" to tell default document
open "Disk:Users:yourusername:Library:Application Support:OmniFocus:Perspectives:perspectivename.ofocus-perspective"
end tell
tell application "OmniFocus" to tell default document
save in "Users:yourusername:Desktop:filename" as "HTML"
end tell


UPDATE 3rd July 2008 – removed last 2 extra lines of code left from a bad copy/past from Automator.

Hope this saves someone the 15 mins of googling it took me to knock this up. Enjoy.

[UPDATE] I’m 2.06GB out of 45 GB backed up after 3 days. So far so good.

To explain a bit more, the Sony Ericsson M600i is a particularly nice phone, but along with the P990 it really doesn’t play with well the Mac. Out of the box it’s not possible to sync contacts or calendars, or even mount the internal memory or memory card on your desktop. Basically, it’s a pretty closed system. So, what follows is a quick round-up of how to accomplish basic transfer and syncing capabilities, and ways to go beyond that if you really want.

File Transfer

According to Magnus Nordlander, the M600i is recognised by the Mac as a communications device when connected via USB – a modem of sorts, but a pretty useless one when in this mode. Selecting File Transfer in the M600i USB settings does nothing to help the situation, so Magnus developed a .kext system extension which fools the mac into treating it as Mass Storage device, allowing you to mount the memory card (but not the M600i’s internal memory) on your desktop, which opens a whole realm of other possibilities in getting media to and from your phone. Thanks Magnus – this is REALLY useful.

Contact Syncing

Let me preface this with a caveat – I have NOT found a way to get true syncing of contacts working between the mac and M600i. It is possible however to send contacts back and forth between the two fairly easily – so it becomes a game of sending an updated contact from the device (Mac or M600i) on which it was updated most recently. Pain in the rear, but this is how it’s done…

Mac to M600i

1. Fire up Address Book, and go to the preferences section. Under the vCards option ensure that the vCard format is set to 2.1 and not 3.0. The M600i doesn’t like 3.0 format for some reason, and errors on import. I don’t know what you lose by selecting 2.1 over 3.0, but I haven’t noticed the difference. Would someone care to enlighten me?
2. Next, in Address Book’s main window, select the contacts or group of contacts that you want sent to your phone – could also be your whole library.
3. In the file menu, choose Export vCard and export the contacts as a single group to a convenient location (your desktop?)
4. IMPORTANT: Make sure any changes made on the phone, but not present on your Mac have been sent across (using the process below)
5. Delete all contacts on your M600i. There’s a bit of an odd way of doing this, but quick – in your M600i contacts list, select More, then Mark, then Mark All. Then go back into the Menu and select delete. Contacts have to be deleted as they don’t get overwritten in the next step.
6. Send your contacts file saved above to the M600i via bluetooth (invoking Apple-Shift-B with the file selected or your other preferred manner), and open it up on the phone, which will then import the contacts from your Mac Address Book to your phone.

M600i to Mac
I don’t really have any desire to move my whole phone address book to my Mac, as most of my contact updates are done on my MacBook. It acts really as a central contact management hub, with contacts going out to my iPod, phone, online etc. So, what follows is how to send a single (new or updated, for example) contact to the Mac.

1. Select the contact in the M600i contacts menu
2. Send to the Mac via Bluetooth
3. Open the file on your Mac. Magically, Address Book knows if this contact is one already in your Address Book, and if so asks which one you want to keep – the original, or the one you jus transferred from your phone. Got to love Mac simplicity :)

Calendar Syncing

Calendar syncing on the Mac to the M600i is simply not possible out of the box. It is possible to send individual calendar files and events back and forth between the phone and the Mac, but to be honest this gets quite messy and cumbersome very quickly. One way of simplifying this method though is to look at the little app p990iCal by a swiss gu, Thierry Girard. This allows you to export calendar files in M600i friendly formats and send them to the phone. I haven’t got into this method as my way, outlined below, works well for me – but if you want to try something else, this would be a good place to start.

So, the solution I have come up with is a bit roundabout, and to get it work fully you have to cough up a bit of cash – but, it works, as in events on the Mac get synced to the phone, and vice versa. There’s the free, slightly limited way, or the more expensive, but with full sync way. They both involve using Google Calendar and GooSync as conduits from your Mac to your M600i.

The free, but limited way

iCal on your Mac < Google Calendar <> Goosync (with 1 calendar limitation) <> M600i
(note: > indicates a one-way sync, <> two-way)

As Google Calendar has to act as a conduit to Goosync, with which you can sync your phone using your service provider’s data connection, you pretty much have to commit to using Google Calendar as your primary calendaring application over iCal. That’s the easiest method. This is no bad thing IMO, GCal rocks my calendaring world, however that may not suit everyone. Somehow though, you HAVE to get the events you want on your phone into a single calendar in Google Calendar, as the free Goosync service only supports syncing one calendar to your phone. The way you do that is up to you. I’d really recommend spending some money on this though, as the solution really does work well, and gives you fully synced phone, online and Mac calendaring…

The more costly, but fully synced way

iCal on your Mac <> Spanning Sync software ($25/yr) <> Google Calendar <> Goosync (paid service, £19) <> M600i

As you can see, this method results in all events coming across successfully from phone to Mac – easily, and virtually automatically. Spanning Sync syncs iCal calendars with Google Calendar, and the service has so far been absolutely rock solid. The company is open and forthcoming about any issues they are having, and having all your iCal calendars online and synced up to GCal is very valuable for those who work at multiple computers.

Spanning Sync for Mac System Preference Pane

The paid version of Goosync will then sync all of your calendars from GCal across to your phone – data transfer from your phone is really minimal which should keep costs down for those without unlimited data plans, and so far the service has never failed in my month or so of testing, so it’s thoroughly recommended.

In addition you could of course use only one of paid versions of Spanning Sync or Goosync if one of Google Calendar or iCal is more important to you.

Some notes on using Goosync with your Phone
Goosync setup is fairly easy, but still a little involved. You input your phone number into the Goosync site, and if you’re phone can handle automatic setup (which the M600i can) then you are sent a text with the setup to install. This is quick, and then to sync your calendar you choose Manage Calendar on the Calendar menu on the M600i, and then Synchronise, and then the M600i syncs over your phone’s network to Google Calendar. Like magic really.

Goosync has to give each of your Calendars in Google calendar a prefix of up to five letters which you can customise- so you can work out which calendar is what on your phone. If you only have a couple of calendars it might get annoying as the additional characters mean that less of the event info can be seen on your phone without going into the event details themselves. No way around this though really, just a small detail.

Full disclaimer – I was given a years use of Goosync for free when I offered to test their full service and include some explanation as to how it can work for you. This review IS unbiased though, Goosync really does work well and only has a few minor limitations, as listed above.

Beyond Calendars and Contacts

There’s more software that can be run on the Mac to make it work better with the M600i – check out SyncTunes or iTunemyWalkman (better as it will auto launch on memory card mount), which will sync an iTunes playlist with a folder on your memory stick, or the Copy Playlist to Card applescript which is a lighter weight way of doing the same thing – ideal for listening to music on your phone. Also, take a look at my iPhoto to Phone Automator workflows, which are designed to take Photos in iPhoto to your phone at the right resolution. The M600i version is here (zip file).

I’ll also write up in a forthcoming post the best applications I have found so far for UIQ 3 and Java – as it’s possible to really extend the functionality of your phone for virtually no outlay and little time investment. Look for that coming soon (but soon in newformula.org world – could mean 2008!)

When geotagging photos using track logs, the only real choice is GPSPhotoLinker. I love the fact that GPSPhotoLinker also embeds city, state and country info into your photos as well as regular lat and lon coordinates, but it will only take input into photos as hand-keyed text when not using GPX track logs; i.e. there is no integration with any external mapping programs. After several weeks of hand typing coordinates out of Google Earth and into GPSPhotoLinker, I decided an Applescript was in order to do the job for me, and sorted something out last weekend which, by using UI scripting (i.e. it manipulates menu items and enters text on your behalf), grabs the current co-ordinates from Google Earth and inputs them into the ‘Manually Enter Coordinates’ dialog in GPSPhotoLinker, and then presses the Apply Button. This saves me at least 20 seconds a photo, which makes it worth it for me, and by using the Keyboard pane in System Preferences you can assign it a hot key for instant access in iPhoto.

If you are happy not embedding the extra info into your photos, and GeoTagger works for you, then I’d stick with it. Otherwise, if you were having trouble with it, want a different way of adding GPS info into your EXIF headers, or would like to add the extra data into your Photos that GPSPhotoLinker offers, then take a look at this script.

Usage:

1. Drag the photo(s) you want to tag into GPSPhotoLinker’s Manual Mode (from iPhoto or wherever else)
2. Find the position the photo was taken in Google Earth
3. Make sure the photo or photos are selected in GPSPhotoLinker
4. Run the script
5. You’re done.

Download the script here. Credit is given to Craig Stanton to the first part of the script which gets the co-ordinates from Google Earth.

Or, the code is below if you want to integrate into your own workflow in some way:

tell application "Google Earth"
set viewInf to GetViewInfo
set coords to {latitude of viewInf, longitude of viewInf}
end tell
set long to (text item 2 of coords)
set lat to (text item 1 of coords)
activate application "GPSPhotoLinker"
tell application "System Events"
tell process "GPSPhotoLinker"
-- GUI Scripting statements:
click menu item "Manually Enter Coordinates…" of menu 1 of menu bar item "Special" of menu bar 1
set value of text field 1 of window "Manual Coordinate Entry" to lat as text
set value of text field 2 of window "Manual Coordinate Entry" to long as text
click button "Apply" of window "Manual Coordinate Entry"
end tell
end tell

Having covered skiing and basecamp, I thought it was about time for running…

On the Nike+ website they have recently released widgets for tracking your current goals on Nike+. I’m going to assume you have at least heard of Nike+, but if not go check it out, it really is quite a cool way to move you away from a computer screen and get some exercise. Anyway, the widgets they have provided are, in classic web 2.0 style, in beta- but work fairly well. They take up a fair bit of screen space, but other than that they look nice with a funky ‘wet floor’ style reflection going on. The only problem I had with them is that you can’t have more than one running at a time – well, you can, but the second one defaults to whatever goal was showing on the first one when you reboot OS X or whatever, which is pretty pointless.

In use, you flip them over and the widget asks for your login details, as you’d expect. After logging in the widget gives you a dropdown of the goals that you currently have active. I noticed that when going to download them from the Nike+ website, they only showed up when the country selected was the US, so you may have to change your country settings temporarily.

Available for download in both Yahoo Widget Engine and OS X dashboard flavours, they are a really nice and quick way of keeping up to date on your current running goals in Nike+. Go check them out.

The Nike+ widget running under Yahoo Widget Engine on Windows…

… and running under OS X.

• Part 1: At point of capture

Firstly, a brief introduction. I like to take photos, lots of them in fact. So far this year I’m up to a couple of hundred shots that I want to keep. I also like having things neat, tidy and in their place, and this applies equally to my iPhoto library too, which is growing at a steady rate of knots and currently stands at about 3,500 photos taken over 3 or 4 years. Not loads, but enough to start losing nice shots in which is an ever increasing problem as more photos get added.

Second, I’m on a Mac. Sorry PC users, that’s the way it is round here and the way it will continue to be. That’s not to say that any of the processes that I through or tips that I throw out aren’t relevant, I just won’t know the best way of doing on a PC, sorry.

Third, these processes/this workflow is not intended to be ‘better’ than anyone elses, or provide any advantages over your own – it’s just mine. If you find any of the tips helpful then I’m really happy; if not then no big deal, hopefully you got to feel smug as your own way of doing things must suit you better. On with the show…

This post is going to deal with everything that I do at the time of taking a photo (with the exception of actually taking it, as I’m no pro, so don’t really have a leg to stand on when it comes to ‘real’ photography!). As I explained before, organisation of the photos back in my library is important to me, so whenever I’m out with a camera I like to mentally record what’s going on around me, and more specifically where I am geographically so that I’m able to tag the photo in iPhoto and ‘geotag’ the photos when they get back to my mac. It’s the geotagging part of processing the images that I found especially interesting, as I find playing around with the photos, showing them to friends/family etc. when placed on a maps such as Google Maps or Google Earth.

The basics – it really makes your life easier to have your camera setup properly before taking any photos, mainly in respect to timezone and current time. Some digital cameras have both settings, but all have an option to change the current date and time. As this information is embedded into the photograph and is used when referencing the photos against a location at a certain point in time (more on this later), it’s pretty essential that it’s as accurate as you can get it.

In order to geotag your photo further down the track when you get home, clearly you’ll need to know the location of the photo. There’s essentially two ways of doing this – using a track log from a GPS of some kind, or remembering (roughly) where you are in relation to your surroundings to then get a more precise location when you get home. Now, you may think I’m talking complete crap here – of course you remember where you took a photo, right? Well, that’s true, but as time goes by it will become harder to remember where less memorable photos were taken, which for me is one of the benefits. of geotagging your photos- so that you can come back to them at a future date, and not have to rack your brain as to where it was taken.

So, having been on a three month tour of South East Asia, after you return home one beach pretty much looks like another. Having some kind of hard record as to where you where and when means that you can Google (or search on Google Earth) that place, find the location and geotag that photo. There are of course limitless ways you can do this; but for me noting down a date and place on paper has got to be one of the easiest. Alternatively, get a map (tourist, something more accurate, guide book, whatever) of where you have been and briefly annotate it with dates and times.

If you want a digital way of doing it, many digital cameras (well, from my experience every Canon I have had) offer a feature where you can annotate any image with a brief audio recording. I’ve yet to use this, but that could also prove very useful for tagging later down the track if you have a large enough memory card. Finally, logging your rough journey around a city with times, street names etc. around the time that you shoot using an internet enabled mobile phone, and a service like Backpack, would also do the trick.

The idea is to build up some references to know where you have been and when, so that upon returning to process your images you can apply relevant tags, descriptions and location info. Whether you do that in your head or in some other form is up to you. For me it depends on the length of time between taking the photo and when I’m likely to be processing it on my computer – the longer this is the more likely I am to write something down.

In addition to this, if you are serious about getting location metadata attached to your photos (as well as viewing tracks of your travels/ski runs/walks/bikes etc) then investing in a cheap GPS is a must. You can pick up something like a Garmin etrex fairly cheaply on ebay (~£50 in the UK), or for something for photography specific, check out the Sony GPS-CS1, and my review of it here. The GPS will log your position every few seconds to a simple text file which you can copy back to your Mac when you get home, and you can then convert the file to something that would be viewable on Google Earth. By matching the location recorded at the time a photo was taken, software can then embed the location (latitude, longitude, city, state etc, and possibly even altitude) into the photo’s EXIF headers.

In the real world, it’s a combination of both of the above that works for me. Having the GPS on and attached to part of my backpack for times when I really won’t know where I have been that day, as well as mentally or otherwise recording places and times that I took photos both work for me for Geotagging my photos further down the track. In the next few posts I’ll cover how to actually use the information that you have recorded to get the precise location embedded in your photos as easily as possible, the way I like to tag photos in iPhoto, sharing them online with this information using Flickr, and other ways of showing off your photo creations to the world.

I’m aware that some of the content in this post might seem a bit, well, obvious. I really wanted to go over the first steps you might need to take in order to start tagging your photos more completely, but if you’ve found it annoying or wish to let me know any criticisms you may have, please do so in the comments!

Considering I don’t need to change the settings in this program pretty much ever, this is fairly pointless. However, a quick bit of googling got me to the following hack – break the app open by right clicking on it then selecting ‘Show Package Contents’, navigate to the Info.plist file and open it in your preferred text editor. Then add the following lines at the end of the keys and strings:

<key>NSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>

And Bob’s your Uncle. One thing to bear in mind – this also removes any way of selecting the application when open, other than double clicking it in the finder, and removes any menus for that app when in focus. As such it’s best to keep a backup copy hanging around so that you can open that, make any changes to preferences etc as need be, close it and reopen the hacked version for day to day use.

NB – don’t blame me if this screws anything up.