Now you can use, for example:

• date +5
• long +21
• short tomorrow 2pm
• date thurs 3:15pm

Just a couple of tweaks because I found I needed them. The download has been updated (see bottom of post), and we’ll call it version 1.1.

p.s. I know I’ve been a little quiet on the blog lately, I’ve had my head buried in too many projects. Marked has some fantastic new features, though, including MarsEdit and VoodooPad support, as well as the ability to accept an entire folder as input and always preview the most recently-edited text file. The latter is perfect for nvALT and Jekyll blogs. Lots of writing to do for other projects, too, so there may be some more dead air. I’m not gone, I’m just making stuff.

Related posts:

1. OS X Service for natural language dates
2. Natural language date conversion for TextMate
3. Natural language dates for TextExpander

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Natural Language Date Service update

Many web devs/designers are familiar with Zen Coding, a little tool available for many text editors which turns shorthand strings into full HTML, among a lot of other nifty tricks. A derivation called Sparkup came out a couple of years back. It added the ability to backtrack up the hierarchy from within the shorthand snippet, which I found to be amazingly useful.

So this all started when I made a keybinding yesterday which turns selected text into a paired HTML tag and allows attributes, so div id="heythere" converts to <div id="heythere"></div> when I type Control-< (TextMate style). That’s available on the KeyBindings github repo, if you’re interested. I showed the KeyBinding to Joe Bartlett and the first thing he asked was whether it could do what Zen Coding does. Rabbit hole.

It wouldn’t happen as a keybinding, but it could work as a System Service. No use reinventing the wheel, so I spent a while playing with getting Zen Coding to fit before I remembered Sparkup. Sparkup’s features are pretty minimal compared to the huge toolset that Zen has become, and as such it fits in one file with no dependencies. Perfect for a Service.

I packaged it up and am posting it here. Totally not my work:

Sparkup is written by Rico Sta. Cruz and is released under the MIT license.

This project is inspired by Zen Coding of Vadim Makeev. The Zen HTML syntax is forward-compatible with Sparkup (anything that Zen HTML can parse, Sparkup can too).

Download the System Service version below. To use it, unzip and add the .workflow file to ~/Library/Services. Then, open up System Preferences and go to the keyboard shortcuts tab. Select System Services, find it in the panel on the right and click the “Add Shortcut” button that appears when you hover over the right side of its row in the list. Give it a keyboard shortcut you’ll remember. I used Ctrl-, because that’s what it’s bound to in Espresso. Muscle memory.

Now you can type out a shorthand string, select it and hit your shortcut key to watch it blossom into full HTML. Like a code flower. There are quite a few of examples on the Sparkup page, so I’m not going to break down the syntax here. Basically:

div.prettyneat#really>ul>li.item$*2<ol>li*2{ordered list item}+p.last

becomes:

<div class="prettyneat" id="really">
    <ul>
        <li class="item1"></li>
        <li class="item2"></li>
    </ul>
    <ol>
        <li>ordered list item</li>
        <li>ordered list item</li>
        <p class="last"></p>
    </ol>
</div>

Note that, unlike Zen Coding, you can use “<” to traverse back up the tree. You can also use linebreaks and indentations on longer strings if it helps you keep things straight. Useful when you’re laying out an entire document structure in one string:

div.prettyneat#really>
p.first{content}
+p*2
+ul>
    li.item$*6>a[href=#]
<<ol>
    li*3{ordered list item}
+p.last

Also, “html:5″ will give you a full HTML5 document with UTF-8 meta, head and body, and additional elements appended with “>” will go inside the body section. Very handy to have when you’re outside of your usual HTML editor.

Related posts:

1. Quick Link: Sparkup rocks my world a little
2. Testing from Vim
3. Quick Tip: MindManager to (clean) HTML

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Sparkup System Service, HTML shorthand everywhere

Related posts:

1. A Service for sharing Dropbox link collections
2. Dropbox and seamless mutli-Mac computing?
3. System Service: Clip to Day One

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Dropbox Collection Service fixed

It takes a selection of files in your Dropbox public folder and creates a web page with links to each, as well as a button for opening them all in tabs. It doesn’t move them to Dropbox for you, it just makes the links once they’re there and in your public folder (or any subfolder of it). Once it’s run, there’s a dated HTML file in the root public folder that you can send a public link to.

You only need to configure your Dropbox ID, which you can find as a string of numbers in any public url (the long version) that you create. Open up the Service in Automator and edit the very first line. After that, it’s good to go. The style of the page is in a compressed format, not to obscure it, just to keep things optimized. If you want to edit it, either replace the <style> section, or run the chunk of text through a CSS formatter and get the pretty version.

To install, just drop it into ~/Library/Services or double click the file and let it install itself. It will show up in your Services menu when you right click after selecting some files. The final output looks like this, and works with as many files as you want to share at once:

If your workflow involves sharing collections of files where just sharing a Dropbox folder is inconvenient or not an option, I hope this saves you some time!

Related posts:

1. Dropbox Collection Service fixed
2. Dropbox and seamless mutli-Mac computing?
3. Quick tip: running nvALT after a Notational Velocity update

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at A Service for sharing Dropbox link collections

Block quoting

The first of the blockquoting tools, “Blockquote Selection,” just adds a “>” and a space before every line in the selection which contains text. It preserves existing indentation and is best for quoting single paragraphs quickly or for large chunks with code blocks and other indented text you want to keep that way.

The second version, “Convert Indents to Quote Levels,” is for turning hierarchically-indented text (using tabs, not spaces) into nested blockquotes in Markdown format. In essence, it swaps tabs for >‘s. You can turn a conversation like this:

Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum 

    exercitationem ullam corporis 

        suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea 

            commodi consequatur? 

        Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea 

voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

into this:

> Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum

>> exercitationem ullam corporis

>>> suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea

>>>> commodi consequatur?

>>> Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea

> voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

Which previews/converts as something like:

Self-linking URLs

The other big feature, and probably the one that took me the most time this evening, is a service for converting standalone URLs into hyperlinks. If a URL isn’t part of an HTML or Markdown (reference or inline) link, it gets turned into a Markdown-style self-link, which will preview/convert as a hyperlink with the URL itself as the text. This is done by surrounding the URL with angle brackets (<http://yourlink.com>).

This service will ignore anything in an href attribute, anything preceded by ”](“ (assumed to be an inline link), anything on a line that starts with a reference ([title]: ...) and any links that are already “self-linked.” It looks for common punctuation marks at the end of a link and removes them from the conversion (comma, period, etc.). It also does its best to recognize when a paired character (parenthesis, brackets, quotes) exists at the beginning and end of the link so they can be separated from the url without brutally removing every occurence from the link (thus breaking any wikipedia link, et al)¹.

The Service currently only looks for http, https and ftp links. If you have another use case I should consider, let me know.

Unwrap Paragraphs updated

The Unwrap Paragraphs service I added the other day has had a small dose of “smart” added to it. It won’t mess with your code blocks or other specially-formatted text now, and should do a much better job of concatenating words that were hyphenated when the text was hard-wrapped to begin with. Let me know how it goes, I’m definitely looking to improve this one. All of them, really, so don’t be shy with the feedback.

Download

You can grab the whole pack of Services and read up on the rest of the included tools on the Markdown Service Tools project page. There’s a readme included in the download (and I just updated it and the documentation) with the full contents of that page, so feel free to download directly below and browse that on your own.

Related posts:

1. Markdown Service Tools 1.3
2. Some Chrome love for the Markdown Service Tools
3. Unwrap Paragraphs for the Markdown Service Tools

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Markdown Service Tools get blockquotes, self-links and more

Opposite from the “Preserve line breaks” service, this one will look for consecutive lines and merge them together into one paragraph. It handles hyphenated words and won’t mess up em/en dashes in Markdown style (-- or ---). If there’s a newline between two lines, it assumes it’s a new paragraph and treats it as such.

Note: this does currently unwrap list items and code blocks as well. It should be used selectively on paragraph text. I’ll eventually put in the time to come up with a regular expression that will avoid this.

Version 1.3.1 is available on the Markdown Service Tools project page. Somebody owes me a box of Aussie Tim Tams.

Related posts:

1. Markdown Service Tools get blockquotes, self-links and more
2. Some Chrome love for the Markdown Service Tools
3. Markdown Service Tools 1.3

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Unwrap Paragraphs for the Markdown Service Tools

Notably, Force Line Breaks has become Preserve Line Breaks, a slightly more elegant service for getting github-style linebreaks in your documents. If you have a block of text with hard returns in it…

this is a line
this is a line following a hard return

(Multi)Markdown will generally concatenate those into a single paragraph. This service looks for these and adds the two spaces at the end of the line required to convert it into a <br> and preserve your formatting.

Lucky Link is now Auto-link web search, the same idea but it functions a little better. Select some text and run it to get a Markdown link to the top result from a web search for that text.

There are a couple of inclusions, such as cleanup scripts for tables and lists, and minor revisions for other commands. Download it from the Markdown Services project page.

Related posts:

1. Markdown Service Tools get blockquotes, self-links and more
2. Some Chrome love for the Markdown Service Tools
3. Unwrap Paragraphs for the Markdown Service Tools

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Markdown Service Tools 1.3

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.

What David wanted to do was take the idea behind my “Inline Links to References” command in the Markdown Service Tools and do something similar for footnotes, allowing him to write footnotes inline in a paragraph and have them converted before processing with MultiMarkdown. It’s not such a chore to skip a few lines and drop in the footnote syntax that this should be part of the spec, but it is something I would find handy in several situations. So…

The format I picked uses a syntax like this to denote a footnote:

This is the regular text(*This is the footnote*), and you can drop the footnote in at any point.

The Service can handle footnotes inside of lines, at the end of lines, spanning multiple lines with breaks (creates paragraphs) and does fine with Markdown within the footnote. One nice thing about this syntax is that–if you’re previewing as you write–it italicizes the output to differentiate it until you’ve used the service to move it out of the main text.

Multi-line footnotes need to begin at the end of a line of text, and just use double-newlines to separate paragraphs within the footnote, e.g.:

...the end of the paragraph. (*This is a footnote

which is going to span

more than one line*)

Here’s the script, also available as a Service download at the end of the post.

Update: I just added a fix (in code below and the Service download) for making sure that footnote reference titles aren’t duplicated if you have existing MultiMarkdown-formatted footnotes in the document.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
 
def e_sh(str)
	str.to_s.gsub(/(?=[^a-zA-Z0-9_.\/\-\x7F-\xFF\n])/n, '\\')
end
 
input = STDIN.read
 
footnotes = input.scan(/\(\*(.*?)\*\)/m)
existing = input.scan(/^\[\^fn(\d+)\]: /i)
counter = existing.empty? ? 1 : existing.uniq.sort[-1].join.to_i + 1
 
output = []
footnotes.each {|note| 
	output << {'orig' => note[0], 'title' => "fn#{counter}", 'footnote' => note[0] }
	counter += 1
}
 
o = []
output.each_with_index { |x,i| 
	o.push("[^#{x['title']}]: #{x['footnote'].gsub(/\n\n(\s*.)/,"\n\n\t\\1")}")
	input.gsub!(/\(\*#{e_sh x['orig']}\*\)/m,"[^#{x['title']}]")
}
puts input.strip + "\n\n#{o.join("\n\n")}\n"

I’m in San Francisco for an AOL Tech code jam right now, so I don’t have a lot of time to thoroughly test this. Please let me know about any bugs that need fixing.

If you’re in San Francisco and like coffee or beer, hit me up on Twitter. If you’re here for Macworld, then you’d better be at my “40 Tips in 40 Minutes” talk with David Sparks and Merlin Mann on Thursday!

Related posts:

1. Unwrap Paragraphs for the Markdown Service Tools
2. A better System Service for Evernote clipping — with MultiMarkdown
3. Natural Language Date Service update

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at A Service for writing MultiMarkdown footnotes inline

Dayone uses a very simple XML format in separate files to store your entries. It’s easy to replicate the structure using a script, allowing you to directly generating your own Day One entries from any part of your workflow. I’m bypassing the dayone CLI and dropping the updates in directly for added flexibility. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love that Day One comes with a CLI, I just wanted to experiment around it.

I’m using the new iCloud support for sync, and this Service is built to work with that folder structure by default. The version below (and in the download) looks in “~/Library/Mobile Documents/” (where iCloud stores documents) for a folder containing the word “dayoneapp.” I don’t know offhand what the bizarre names of the folders indicate, but they differ between accounts, so we have to grep out the matching folder. Assuming your Journal is called Journal_dayone (default) and you’re using iCloud, you shouldn’t have to edit anything. If it doesn’t work, run this in Terminal and copy the resulting path into the “dayonepath” variable:

find ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/ -name "Journal_dayone"

If you’re using Dropbox, you’ll just need to make a minor alteration to the “dayonepath” variable. Delete the line starting with “dayonedir” and hardcode the Unix (POSIX) path to the “entries” folder, located directly inside of the Journal.dayone bundle in your Dropbox root folder. It will most likely be /Users/[yourusername]/Dropbox/Journal.dayone/entries/ if you haven’t changed any defaults in Dropbox or Day One.

The service itself is available for download at the end of the post, or you can take the script below and home-roll your own in Automator. It should work out of the box, no need for ruby gems or symlinked CLIs.

The only configuration you may want to edit is the “starred” variable. This defaults to off because Services aren’t interactive and you probably don’t want to star every entry you clip. If you do, though, just change “starred = false” to “starred = true” and it will make your calendar look like a planetarium.

The Service will use /usr/bin/textutil to strip out any rich text artifacts. I’m not certain this is necessary, but I found that when clipping rich text I would lose all of my line breaks and indents. This seems to solve it. The script also looks for text with hard breaks and handles them Github-style, preserving breaks using Markdown line break syntax.

If you have Growl running, you’ll get a notification. To be polite, it checks for Growl before attempting any notifications. The check can be slow sometimes, though, so you may want to either remove the check if you always have Growl running, or remove the whole Growl section at the end if you don’t.

The script:

Here’s the script. The same script can be found in the Service download at the end by opening the .workflow file in Automator. You can easily customize/edit from there, so this is posted just for reference.

require 'time'
require 'erb'
 
def e_sh(str)
	str.to_s.gsub(/(?=[^a-zA-Z0-9_.\/\-\x7F-\xFF\n])/n, '\\').gsub(/\n/, "'\n'").sub(/^$/, "''")
end
 
input = STDIN.read
entrytext = %x{echo #{e_sh input}|textutil -stdin -convert txt -stdout}
entrytext.gsub!(/\n([^\n])/,"    \n\\1")
uuid = %x{uuidgen}.gsub(/-/,'').strip
datestamp = Time.now.utc.iso8601
starred = false
 
dayonedir = %x{ls ~/Library/Mobile\\ Documents/|grep dayoneapp}.strip
dayonepath = "~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/#{dayonedir}/Documents/Journal_dayone/entries/"
 
template = ERB.new <<-XMLTEMPLATE
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Creation Date</key>
	<date><%= datestamp %></date>
	<key>Entry Text</key>
	<string><![CDATA[<%= entrytext %>]]></string>
	<key>Starred</key>
	<<%= starred %>/>
	<key>UUID</key>
	<string><%= uuid %></string>
</dict>
</plist>
XMLTEMPLATE
 
fh = File.new(File.expand_path(dayonepath+uuid+".doentry"),'w+')
fh.puts template.result(binding)
fh.close
 
growl_running = %x{osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to return (count of (every process whose bundle identifier is "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp")) > 0'}
 
if growl_running
  %x{osascript -e 'tell application id "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp" to register as application "Clip to Day One" all notifications {"Clip Complete"} default notifications {"Clip Complete"} icon of application "Day One"'}
  %x{osascript -e 'tell application id "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp" to notify with name "Clip Complete" title "Log to Day One" description "Clipped to Day One" application name "Clip to Day One"'}
end

Side note: I mentioned to @brianstucki that this Service might contain the necessary ingredients for an Evernote-to-Day-One solution, but I’ve realized it’s really only the last part of the equation. What you’d probably want to do with most RTF/text notes is export HTML, extract the “created on” meta and parse it into the correct date format, then pipe the rest of the contents through markdownify_cli.php, passing the result to dayone new. Then you’ll have nice, Markdown versions of your notes from Evernote, preserving much of the formatting. I tested this, and it works pretty flawlessly for text notes.

Download

For complete instructions on installing the service (and adding a keyboard shortcut for it), see the how-to posted here.

Related posts:

1. Quick Tip: Quickly clear stuck Growl notifications
2. Clear sticky Growl notifications with a keyboard shortcut
3. A System Service for to. url shortening

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at System Service: Clip to Day One

I’ve posted two more updates to the Markdown Service Tools. The first change is a fix for UTF-8 characters in the HTML to Clipboard Service I introduced yesterday. I had no idea that pbcopy didn’t like UTF-8 by default. I found a solution at Mac OS X Hints which seems to be working. I updated the Service in the main download, let me know if it still has trouble with any UTF-8/16 characters.

Secondly, I added a Service that allows you to select an entire document’s text and convert any inline links to reference-style links, with the references sorted and neatly placed at the end of the document. It’s pretty smart about maintaining existing reference links, creating titles, recognizing multiple instances of links, etc., but I can’t account for everyone’s writing style. If you have a reasonable suggestion for improvements (or find any bugs, which is likely), do drop me a line and let me know.

Visit the Markdown Service Tools project page for full info and download.

Related posts:

1. Markdown Service Tools get blockquotes, self-links and more
2. A Service for writing MultiMarkdown footnotes inline
3. Some Chrome love for the Markdown Service Tools

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Auto-convert your inline Markdown links to references

I wrote the basic script in Ruby to run as a TextMate command:

input = STDIN.read
 
# Quick function to add commas to long values
def add_commas( number )
  number.to_s.reverse.scan(/(?:\d*\.)?\d{1,3}-?/).join(',').reverse
end
 
# Scan for numbers in the text
arr = input.scan(/\.?\d[\d,]+(?:\.\d+)?/).map{|line|
  # remove non-decimal characters from results and convert to float
  line.gsub(/[^\d\.]/,'').to_f
}.sort
 
print input # output the original text
 
# if there were 2 or more numbers found, output the additional information
print "\n - Average of #{arr.size} numbers ranging from #{arr[0]} to #{arr[arr.size-1]}: " + add_commas(arr.inject(0.0) { |sum,el| sum + el } / arr.size ) unless arr.empty? || arr.size == 1

The script is simple enough that it should be easily adjustable to perform any kind of basic math on the array of numbers found in the text. The numbers don’t have to be in any order in the input; they can be listed vertically or horizontally or can just be scattered throughout text or messy table code. The regular expression should find them.

The TextMate command suited my needs just fine, but then I started thinking about sharing it. What format would make the most sense? A System Service that accepted text and appended a line with the average? A TextExpander snippet that ran on the clipboard? A LaunchBar action that worked with Instant Send or Copy/Paste? I couldn’t decide, and since the script was the only time-consuming part, I went ahead and made all of the above.

The TextExpander snippet is now in the Tools group of my TextExpander projects. If you’re subscribed to that group via URL, your group already updated with the “Average numbers in clipboard” snippet. Otherwise, go ahead and download it or set up a new subscription.

The other two versions (and the script) are in the download below, and I threw in the original TextMate command, too. The LaunchBar action is actually a Script Bundle with the Ruby script packaged inside. If you’ve ever wondered how to reference a self-contained script in AppleScript, it’s a decent example. It installs to ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Actions. The System Service is a standard Automator action using the script above, and installs to ~/Library/Services.

Want to see a video of it? Really? Why? I’m in that semi-asleep state where I thought it would be easier to show what it does than explain it. Since I doubt anyone else really has a need for this script, the video is a tribute to my ability to waste time in the early morning.

Related posts:

1. Geeklet: 1-minute average CPU load
2. Marked 1.4 Teaser
3. Seriously easy HTML5 video encoding

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at An average morning

I know there have been a lot of posts here today (at least compared to my average)… I’m on “vacation,” technically. I’m actually packing up boxes for a move to a new house over the next couple of days, and this is my OSHA break. I make no promises about keeping this rate of posting up!

Anyway, you can download the latest version of the Markdown Service Tools below, or see the project page for more information on all of the included services.

Related posts:

1. Markdown Service Tools 1.3
2. Unwrap Paragraphs for the Markdown Service Tools
3. New Markdown Service tool: HTML to Clipboard

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Some Chrome love for the Markdown Service Tools

I left it as the Perl version instead of the new PEG version because it was easier to embed, and allows me to force “snippet” rendering. Modify as you see fit, but this version makes a nice, neat package that does MultiMarkdown rendering without the need for any other installation. I thought others might find it useful, especially as an addition to Marked and nvALT capabilities, so here it is!

Download the service as part of the Markdown Service Tools package. See the how-to page on Installing System Services if you have questions!

Related posts:

1. Some Chrome love for the Markdown Service Tools
2. Unwrap Paragraphs for the Markdown Service Tools
3. Quick Tip: clean up your MultiMarkdown tables

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at New Markdown Service tool: HTML to Clipboard

I knocked out a quick project before I got around to my first App Review, so I figured I’d go ahead and share it…

A few people have requested a TextExpander set for dates. The problem is, getting the current date is easy with TextExpander variables, so that one’s not worth the time to me. Anything else requires some scripting, and to be really flexible the set would need to include a very large array of snippets; more than I could possibly keep straight. It could be done with one snippet if you could use the Fill In dialog as an input to a shell script, but you can’t (are you listening Smile?).

Instead, I whipped up a System Service this morning that lets you use keywords and natural language date input to return the specified date in various formats. You type out something like date next tuesday, select the text and run the Service and it will give you back 8/23/11. If there’s no matching keyword at the beginning, it will assume %c (strftime formatting) and give you back Tue Aug 23 12:00:00 2011.

The keywords are:

date = ‘%m/%d/%y’ (slashed date)

“date today” gives you “8/20/11″

local = ‘%F’ (localized date)

“local today” gives you (well, me) “2011–8-20″

short = ‘%a, %b %d, %Y’ (abbreviated full date)

“short today” gives you “Sat, Aug 20, 2011″

long = ‘%A, %B %d, %Y’ (long full date)

“long today” gives you “Saturday, August 20, 2011″

The language you can use depends on whether or not you have the “chronic” rubygem installed. If you can install rubygems, go to Terminal and run sudo gem install chronic. If that fails, no worries, it will use PHP’s strtotime to parse your string. It has a slightly more limited vocabulary, but anything like “wednesday,” “yesterday” or “next friday” will work.

It installs like any other service, and you can set a keyboard shortcut for it in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Services. Refer to my how-to on Installing System Services for a step-by-step explanation. This service was written on Lion, but should work fine on Snow Leopard, too.

Feel free to extend the script with more keywords and formats. It’s not too technical, just open up the workflow in Automator and find the case block for the keywords (around line 52). Then, copy the when 'long' then '%A, %B %d, %Y' format and paste new lines (or edit existing ones) before the end statement, keyword first then format (again, see PHP’s documentation for strftime). Both Chronic and strtotime accept times as well, so if you wanted to do something like date friday 3pm, you could add the format string for a time specification to an existing or new keyword.

Update: If you’re looking for something similar in Python, Macdrifter has posted an alternative version which works with Keyboard Maestro. Check it out.

Related posts:

1. Natural Language Date Service update
2. Natural language dates for TextExpander
3. Natural language date conversion for TextMate

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at OS X Service for natural language dates

You can select an entire stylesheet and it will send back the text with the necessary changes, or just run it on a single rule to have it vendor-prefixed for you. It turns this:

p {
  transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
  box-shadow: 1px 1px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.3) ;
  color: #333;
}

into:

p {
	-webkit-transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
	-moz-transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
	-o-transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
	-ms-transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
	transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
 
	-webkit-box-shadow: 1px 1px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.3);
	-moz-box-shadow: 1px 1px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.3);
	box-shadow: 1px 1px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.3);
 
	color: #333;
}

Pretty handy. Sass can do this for you, and there are already plugins for TextMate, Vim, Espresso, Coda and more on Prefixr’s API page. Just thought I’d add one more to the pile.

Unzip it and drop it into ~/Library/Services. Select some text containing CSS3 properties and right click on the selection, then look under “Services” for the Prefixer service. Run it and (assuming you have an internet connection), it’ll do some of the tedious parts of CSS3 for you.

Related posts:

1. App Review: Gradient
2. A little HootSuite userstyling
3. Fixing Gleebox

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Prefixr OS X Service