Looks like an interesting tool to enhance AppleScript functionality. I also like the way they distribute it as an App through the App Store.
Category: Tools
V2 Sneak Peek: Workflows | Alfred App
This looks very, very interesting, I’ll be looking forward to it.
Control the Finder with the Terminal
Interesting approach to connecting the Finder more with the Terminal.
Control the Finder with the Terminal – Mac OS X Hints.
Personally I am satisfied with just using “open .
” from the Terminal and dragging a folder from the Finder to the Terminal icon to open a Terminal window and cd there right away.
Notifications Scripting Lets AppleScript Display User
How to build Mac OS X services with Automator and shell scripting
Nice article on ArsTechnica with some introductory Automator scripting:
How to build Mac OS X services with Automator and shell scripting.
Speak Instapaper Posts — Part 2
In the last part we built a useful workflow that would open a given number of unread article from your Instapaper feed. But we stopped short of the goal, to convert the text of the articles to speech files.
If you look into the library of Automator actions there is one with the promising name “Get Text from Webpage.” However this will extract all the text, usually including all the menus, ads and all the other detritus that clutters webpages these days. The latest version of Safari (( Safari 5, as I write this )) has a functionality called “Reader,” which removes all this clutter and allows the user to focus on just the text. Unfortunately, the “Reader” functionality in Safari is not scriptable.
But before Safari had “Reader” there was the Readability javascriptlet from Arclab90 which does very much the same thing. Since Safari’s AppleScript dictionary allows us to execute arbitrary JavaScript against a webpage, we can use that to extract the relevant text from the article. That saves us from having to recreate the logic of the Readabilty scriptlet in AppleScript.
Do the following with the workflow we built in Part 1:
- duplicate the Workflow file and name the copy: Speak Instapaper Articles to iTunes
- remove the last action “New Safari Documents” from the workflow (( there is a bug in Safari’s AppleScript implementation where document references from freshly created web documents will go stale once the page is loaded. This also affects the “New Safari Documents” action. We will work around this bug in our AppleScript))
- add a new empty “Run AppleScript” action at the end of the workflow and enter the following code:
on run {input, parameters} -- uses the 'Readability' javascript from -- http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ set readabilityScript to "javascript:(function(){readConvertLinksToFootnotes=false;readStyle='style-newspaper';readSize='size-medium';readMargin='margin-medium';_readability_script=document.createElement('script');_readability_script.type='text/javascript';_readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability.js?x='+(Math.random());document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_script);_readability_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css';_readability_css.type='text/css';_readability_css.media='all';document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_css);_readability_print_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_print_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_print_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css';_readability_print_css.media='print';_readability_print_css.type='text/css';document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_print_css);})();" set output to {} tell application "Safari" repeat with x in input set theURL to contents of x make new document with properties {URL:theURL} delay 0.5 repeat until ( (do JavaScript "document.readyState;" in document of window 1) is equal to "complete") delay 0.5 end repeat set d to document of window 1 do JavaScript readabilityScript in d delay 3 repeat until ( (do JavaScript "document.readyState;" in d) is equal to "complete") delay 1 end repeat set thetext to text of d -- remove first three and last four paragraphs since these are Readability links set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return set thetext to (paragraphs 4 through -5 of thetext) as text close d set output to output & {thetext} end repeat end tell return output end run
Let’s slowly go through this code:
- first we setup variable to store the Readabilty javascript code.
- then we initialize a list
output
to store the results. - then we loop through the items that were passed into the action in the
input
variable. In this case the items are the URLs of the Instapaper posts. set theURL to contents of x
this de-references the iterator variable. Due to some oddities of the AppleScript language this is usually a wise thing to do in arepeat
loop.-
make new document with properties {URL:theURL} delay 0.5
we tell Safari to open a new document with the given URL and pause for a while to let Safari start loading
-
repeat until ( (do JavaScript "document.readyState;" in document of window 1) is equal to "complete") delay 0.5 end repeat set d to document of window 1
We have to wait until the page is completely loaded before we can apply the Readability script against the page. Unfortunately Safari does not expose the state of the page (loading or complete) to AppleScript. This is however exposed to the JavaScript DOM within the page and we can access DOM information from AppleScript with the
do Javascript
event. So we poll thedocument.readyState
attribute in Javascript until it reportscomplete
. Then we remember a reference to this document in a variable. ((Safari has a bug where a AppleScript reference to document will change while it is loading, resulting in broken references. All this is a clumsy, but effective workaround.)) - now we can execute the Readability script against the page:
do JavaScript readabilityScript in d delay 3 repeat until ( (do JavaScript "document.readyState;" in d) is equal to "complete") delay 1 end repeat
We use the same DOM trick to wait until Safari is done.
- Now the
text
property of the document contains the cleaned up text of the article. We can extract that, remove some extra lines that Readabilty inserts, close the Safari window and append the text as its own element to theoutput
list.set thetext to text of d -- remove first three and last four paragraphs since these are Readability links set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return set thetext to (paragraphs 4 through -5 of thetext) as text close d set output to output & {thetext}
This would be a good time to save the workflow, and do a test run. You can show the results of the workflow in Automator to see if the text is extracted properly. Readability is not perfect and does not work on all pages, but the success rate is quite high.
The remaining work of converting the text into audio is very straightforward. Add the following workflow actions:
- Text to Audio File
- Import File into iTunes
- Add Songs to Playlist ((You want to create a specific playlist for these files in iTunes))
And then you are done. You can also download the complete Workflow.
Syncing iTunes Libraries
Sync’ing iTunes Libraries | Krypted.com.
So I decided to offload most of my media (photos, movies, etc) off my laptop and onto my Mac Mini server. I also decided that one thing I’d like to live on both is iTunes.
Nice writeup on how to keep a folder in sync with a folder on a server.
Speak Instapaper Posts — Part 1
I saw this in my Twitter stream the other day:
You know what I want? A text-to-speech plugin for @instapaper so, while commuting to/from work, I can listen to the stuff I find at work.
That shouldn’t be too hard, shouldn’t it?
First we have to get the unread articles from Instapaper. If you go instapaper, log in, and go to your unread articles, you can see the RSS button in the URL field in Safari. To get to the RSS feed in Automator, do the following:
- Open Automator, create a new Workflow
- Open www.instapaper.com/u in Safari and drag the link from the URL bar to the empty Automator Workflow window. Automator will create an new “Get Specified URLs” action with the Instapaper URL unread in it
- Add a “Get Feeds from URLs” action next
- Add a “Get Link URLs from Articles” action. Unselect the “only in the same domain” option
- Finally add the “New Safari Documents” action.
- The workflow already does something useful. Save as “Open unread Instapaper articles”
If you ares anything like me this workflow will open quite a large number of pages. I think Instapaper limits the RSS feed to 25. That’s still a lot of new Safari tabs/windows you are opening there. We want to add an action that restricts the number of items passed through it. Surprisingly there is none in the default actions, but this is fairly easy to add. Insert a new “Run AppleScript” action before the “New Safari Documents” action and replace the default code with the following:
on run {input, parameters} set maxNum to 3 -- filters all but the first maxNum items from the articles, change as appropriate -- enter '-1' or remove this action entirely to get all urls if (count of input) > maxNum then set output to items 1 through maxNum of input else set output to input end if return output end run
This will only pass through the first maxNum
of items passed into it, regardless of type. You can change maxNum
to fit your taste and/or needs. You can also set maxNum
to -1
if you want to pass all items without removing the AppleScript action.
Save again and try running it. The next step will be to filter the actual text out of the web page which will be a little tougher and the main topic of Part 2.
Some ssh
Tricks
I found this website with a bunch of ssh
tricks. Some highlights:
Compare a Remote File with a Local File
ssh user@host cat /path/to/remotefile | diff /path/to/localfile -Useful for checking if there are differences between local and remote files.
opendiff
((Part of the Developer Tools installed with Xcode)) and bbdiff
((One of the tools installed by BBEdit)) do not use stdin
for their input, but you can work around that by copying the file to /tmp
first:
scp user@host:/path/to/remotefile /tmp/remotefile && opendiff /path/to/localfile /tmp/remotefile
SSH Connection through host in the middle
ssh -t reachable_host ssh unreachable_hostUnreachable_host is unavailable from local network, but it’s available from reachable_host’s network. This command creates a connection to unreachable_host through “hidden” connection to reachable_host.
Using the -t
option uses less overhead on the intermediate host. Same trick is used later in the article where you directly attach to a remote screen
session:
ssh -t remote_host screen -r
Though I prefer using screen -DR
. Read the man page for details.
The next one however didn’t do anything for me, I suspect there is a piece missing in the command somewhere:
Remove a line in a text File
sed -i 8d ~/.ssh/known_hosts
However there is a dedicated tool for this: use
ssh-keygen -R host
instead. I re-image some machines over and over again and then run into the ssh host key errors. This is very useful.
Enable Some Extra Services
It’s Thanksgiving here in the US. To keep you happy with minimal effort on my side I’ll give you a whole bunch of services to explore, without me (or you) having to write any of them.
Open System Preferences, select the Keyboard preference pane, select the Keyboard Shortcuts Pane and then from the list on the left select “Services.”
There you will find a long list of pre-installed services many of which are disabled by default. Go through the list and enable those that sound promising. “Get Result of AppleScript” and “Add to iTunes as Spoken Track” are two of my favorites.
Any services you have built yourself will also appear in this list. You can disable or re-enable them to keep your context menu trim.
This pane is also where you assign or change keyboard shortcuts. So if there is a service that you use frequently you can further optimize your workflow with a keystroke.