Apr 13
2011

Here’s a neat little command-line utility for searching your address book: aboo. It’s not complex… it just takes a single word or phrase and searches your Address Book entries’ names for it. It can output vcards and YAML, too. I created a fork that adds a few things, most importantly I extended search to business names and notes. It also does a better job of realizing…

Mar 27
2011

I spent an inordinate amount of time not doing useful things today. During this non-productivity bender, I got a little obsessed with making the HTML5 video encoding process easier. I’ve been working on a tutorial site for the Blogsmith Bundle, so this whole deal needed to be sped up. I came out with a script which, when combined with the right command line utilities, takes 90% of…

Mar 05
2011

We’ve covered a small truckload of Bash scripting ideas for Mac and OS X in the previous two posts. It’s time to put them to use and create an Automator app that we can use as a droplet in Finder. If you skipped straight here, it probably means you don’t really want to know about the messy details of the scripts, so this post won’t go into a lot of Unix mumbo jumbo.

Mar 05
2011

In the previous post in this series, we looked at the basic Terminal commands we’d use to grab a Mac application’s icon from the command line. In this post, we’ll flesh out the script a little and turn it into a Bash function with some added features:

We’ll also look at a very, very cool trick for adding tab-completion for application names to the open -a command, as…

Mar 05
2011

I spent a few hours last night nerding out over an easy way to grab a Mac application’s icon. I sent the basic Bash script and an example Automator action off to the other writers at TUAW. Then there was dinner, a movie, drinks and dessert. I found myself back at it when I got home. I am Jack’s complete inability to leave well enough alone.

Feb 02
2011

This is probably going to seem stupid, but every time I decide to do something in Bash that should only take me a minute, I end up losing an hour. I obsess over “better” ways to do everything. Not surprisingly, my motivation often wanes before I actually find the better, more elegant way, so these little projects end up lackluster. Fortunately, I end up learning all kinds of…

Oct 11
2010

If you’re a Things.app user (and a Terminal user), I’ve got a quick function for your .bash_profile that will allow you to quickly add todo items to your inbox with notes and natural-language date parsing.

It uses php’s strtotime function, which does a pretty swell job with simple dates like “next tuesday” or “+12 days”. It’s not very smart, though; you have to…