Connecting nvALT and Address Book

Brett — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:11:46 +0000

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 notes¹ 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…

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

Notes, for me, are different from log entries. I actually like keeping those separate most of the time. ↩
Enabled in AppleScript Editor, Preferences->General->Show Script menu in menubar. Or better, use FastScripts. ↩
It might not. ↩

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

App Review: CodeRunner

Brett — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:16:48 +0000

One for the coders: I discovered CodeRunner by Nikolai Krill a few months back, and it’s proven to be very, very useful in the kind of work that I do. It allows you to test blocks of code and see the results quickly and easily. It has syntax highlighting and autocompletion, as well as the ability to handle a wide variety of languages.

CodeRunner handles AppleScript, C, C++, Java, JavaScript (Node.js), Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and shell scripts. You can add your own languages, compilers/processors and syntaxes, too. The autocomplete libraries for each language are quite good (and very handy), and there are a good number of themes available for syntax highlighting (including my favorite, Twilight). It has auto-pairing and commands for wrapping code in a variety of paired characters, as well as a great set of code-editing tools. You can even pick between indenting with spaces or tabs and set the tab/space width, making it easy to match the code indentation to the settings of the main app you’re coding in.

CodeRunner can also handle code that requires input at runtime, providing a field for passing parameters and input to your functions as needed. In short, it does just about everything I could ask a code-testing application to do.

There are free apps for testing code, but very few that can handle multiple languages and none that I know of which can handle everything that CodeRunner does. If you code in more than one language, CodeRunner is worth every bit of its $4.99 price. Go get it.

Nikolai also has a regular expression testing app in the Mac App Store called Patterns. I highly recommend it as well. The only issue I have with Patterns is that it doesn’t handle highlighting sub-matches, but for 90% of what I need it to do, it’s excellent.

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at App Review: CodeRunner

Brett Terpstraosx - Brett Terpstra

Connecting nvALT and Address Book

The script

App Review: CodeRunner