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…
applescript, macos, nvalt
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.
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!
macworld, personal
Note: The current (Lion-only) version of Marked in the Mac App Store has this functionality built in; this droplet is only useful for Marked users running on Snow Leopard.
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 any change in any of the files in the…
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.
markdown, markdownservices, multimarkdown, scripting, service
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.
css, webdesign
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 today1. 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.
dayone, productivity, service
I have long kept a journal–more precisely, a log–using VoodooPad with the Scratchpad scripts by Ian Beck. It’s been a great system, but after years of usage it’s started to become a bit cumbersome. VoodooPad can handle the load, but running the custom scripts is inconvenient on a document with thousands of pages. In the interest of trying new things (and fiddling away some time this evening), I decided to try switching the system over to Day One.
dayone, logging, productivity
I wanted to share a handy tool that I realized I use daily but rarely talk about. I call it Read2Text, but it’s really just a Frankenstein script which combines Python Readability (license) with html2text (license). The combination allows you to grab web pages, process them with a port of Arc90’s Readability and convert the HTML to Markdown, ready for pasting or piping to a text file.
markdown, productivity
I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite apps from 2011. I wrote a TextMate command to link all of these1 (60+ links in four minutes!), so if you spot any misfire links that I missed, let me know in the comments. This isn’t an all-inclusive list (despite its length), but it’s a good chance to highlight some gems that may have passed under the radar of the big sites.
apps, roundup
Well, here it is: my last Geeklet post of 2011. I think it’s the simplest Geeklet I have, but it’s kind of fun. It uses the I ♥ Quotes API to put a random quote on your desktop.
geeklet, geektool, nerdtool
