Jul 15
2010
Safari 5 has brought several solutions for managing lists of open tabs, from the simple (like my TabLinks extension) to full session-management capabilities (see the beautiful Sessions extension). However, I’ve found I still like using my EverSave script in many situations, primarily because it allows me to annotate, tag and sync my important sessions for later retrieval. One thing’s been bugging me, though, and that’s the inability to do a mass restore on a tab list (i.e. open them all at once)…
Apr 28
2010
I’m fascinated by http://to. It’s a url shortener with no TLD. Some browsers, and apparently some DNS setups, don’t like the urls it creates (they want a .com or .org or anything at the end), so it’s not exactly in heavy usage. Still, I wish they had an API. In lieu of that, here’s a quick Ruby script that will run on a stock OS X install as a System Service. It’s so simple that I’m not even going to package it up… It’ll be a good chance to show the steps for creating your own utilities using Snow Leopard Services:
require 'net/http' require 'cgi'input = STDIN.read http = Net::HTTP.new('to.')
Mar 20
2010
Songza.fm has moved to Songza.org, so I’ve rewritten the old Songza Lucky Link Service for Snow Leopard to match. This new version of the service runs without dependencies, so it should work for any Snow Leopard setup right out of the box. It’s a bit silly, but what it does is take your selected text and run it as a query on Songza.org, parse for the first result (if there are any), shorten that link and insert it after your selected text. A fast, easy way to punctuate your obscure music references in emails and on the web…
Mar 06
2010
Another post, quickly and with less explanation…
The fact that Evernote processes HTML so much better than it does plain or rich text got me thinking and tinkering. I use Markdown (actually, MultiMarkdown) constantly, and it does a great job of turning plain text into valid markup. With (Multi)Markdown, even plain text becomes HTML that–when imported into Evernote–retains most of its formatting. To answer your question, no, I’m not obsessed with Evernote, I’m obsessed with problems I think I could solve. It’s unhealthy…

Dec 31
2009
Download the Evaluate Expression Snow Leopard service: EvaluateExpressionService.zip
This is a stripped down version of a command I have in the TextMate bundle we use at TUAW. It allows you to select any basic numeric equation and evaluate it, replacing the selected text with the results. It will ignore your text if it contains anything but numbers and basic mathematical symbols. Sure, there are plenty of ways to do calculations in OS X (Spotlight, Launchbar, Quicksilver), but I’ve had more and more incidents lately where I just wanted to do quick calculations inline, so I whipped this up…
Nov 12
2009
This is a quick and dirty Snow Leopard Service that scrapes Songza.fm to find a song related to your selected text in most applications. It replaces the selected text with an is.gd shortened link and the name of the first song it found (just to be sure you’re on the same page… literally). The code is also available as a TextMate command for those interested. Update: TextMate command with link selection popup.
The service (and TextMate command) require the Hpricot gem for ruby. In most cases, this should be installable from the command line with […]…

Nov 03
2009
Clippable to Evernote will allow you to trigger the Clippable bookmarklet in Safari and copy the result directly to your “Unfiled” notebook in Evernote. This service is Snow Leopard-only. If you need it modified for Leopard and aren’t sure how, let me know. If there’s some interest, I’ll just work one up and post it.
To install in Snow Leopard, just unzip (double-click the zip file) the file and move the resulting .workflow file to [your home directory]/Library/Services. It should now appear in your Safari->Services menu, in Safari only…