Feb 08
2012
I had a great time today with Myke and Terry on The Bro Show. We talked about Macworld, some of my current projects, and a lot of things that I don’t know as much as I probably should about. Have a listen!
Feb 08
2012
The next evolution of Screenplay Markdown (SPMD) is out, now part of a project called Fountain. It’s quite the collaborative effort:
Fountain comes from several sources. John August and Nima Yousefi developed Scrippets, which used simple markup to embed screenplay-formatted material in websites. Stu Maschwitz drafted a more extensive spec known as Screenplay Markdown or SPMD, designed for full-length screenplays.
Stu and John discovered that they were simultaneously working on similar text-based screenplay formats, and merged them into what you see here. Other contributors to the spec include Martin Vilcans, Brett Terpstra, Jonathan Poritsky, Kent Tessman, and Clinton Torres.
As did its predecessor, Fountain works great with Marked, thanks to hard work by Martin Vilcans (screenplain) and Jonathan Poritsky. Check it out on the Candler blog.
Feb 05
2012
I wrote something a couple of nights ago that I thought I’d share. I’m calling it “Gather,” and it’s basically an “appified” version of my Readability/Markdownify work. A Cocoa version of Marky the Markdownifier, if you will. You can paste in a URL and it will attempt to find the core text of the page, download it and turn it into Markdown for clean web clipping. It displays the result in a field you can copy from, and it can optionally auto-copy the result to your clipboard.
It’s a little shaky, especially on sites with bad markup. I’d say that right now it has about a 60% success rate. As I have time to work on it I’ll be improving this and adding a bevy of features that may eventually become an App Store submission. We’ll see. This proof-of-concept version1, however, is free to download. I’ll ask nicely that you please not steal the idea and beat me to the punch.
This build is Lion-only; it won’t run at all on Snow Leopard. I’m not really taking any feature suggestions right now, as I already have an extensive roadmap for it that will turn it into something highly useful in many situations (and I’m quite aware of what it lacks in this state). I would enjoy hearing from you with your reactions, though.
Credit due
This version uses GGReadability by Curtis Hard. You should definitely check out his work-in-progress app, Caffeinated. It’s an RSS reader with Google Reader support and some serious potential. I’m also using HTML2Text for “markdownifying.”
Enjoy.
Download
I know the icon is pretty terrible. I liked my first version when it was in Photoshop, but it looked horrible in the Dock. It’ll get better. ↩
Connecting nvALT and Address Book
Feb 02, 2012
Here’s a quick, simple AppleScript to help you hook Notational Velocity/nvALT into Address Book. I sometimes want to attach a note or list of links to an entry in my address book, but I don’t like using the notes field. I tend to keep all of my notes in nvALT, and I prefer not to scatter them too far. All I needed was a way to quickly create and link an nvALT note to each address…
ScrivWatcher, one more time
Jan 31, 2012
I’ve updated ScrivWatcher (a utility for previewing compiled Scrivener documents live in Marked) to 1.5. This version has better error handling and a progress bar showing compile progress. It’s still a droplet, you just drop onto the progress bar window instead of a drop pad, or drop a ‘.scriv’ file directly onto the icon.
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…
From my Macworld Diary
Jan 26, 2012
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!
ScrivWatcher droplet, an easier live Scrivener preview
Jan 26, 2012
I got the droplet for ScrivWatcher working, so you don’t need to run the script from the command line if you don’t want to. I made some further updates to the script, and the version on GitHub will stay in sync with this application as it develops, so you can choose to go either way.
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 a full Scrivener document in Marked, live
Jan 25, 2012
BooneJS tweeted me a script yesterday that takes my original “scrivwatch” script and makes it handle full Scrivener documents. It scrapes the XML file to get the order of RTF files in the document, then used the original method to convert and concatenate all of it into a plain text file. If you write in Scrivener using Markdown, you get a file that Marked can preview as a rendered document with any theme. It uses the original datestamp polling to watch for…
A Service for writing MultiMarkdown footnotes inline
Jan 24, 2012
This post should have been titled “What happens to my mornings.”
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.
iOS-inspired popup box CSS
Jan 20, 2012
I tweeted the other day that I had made some CSS buttons in a sleep-deprived haze that I really dug. The only reason I even remembered they were there was a command-line-generated entry in Day One that linked to the file. This is why I log.
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…
System Service: Clip to Day One
Jan 19, 2012
I’m enjoying logging with Day One right now, and getting geeky with it. To that end, I put this project together during the few breaks I’ve had over the last couple of days leading up to the new Engadget live blog launch today. The result is a practical proof of concept in the form of a System Service for clipping any text to Day One. I figured that this could actually be really handy for more people than just me, so here it is.
