Tag: script

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 Safari1 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 workflow2
  • 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 a repeat 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 the document.readyState attribute in Javascript until it reports complete. Then we remember a reference to this document in a variable.3

  • 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 the output 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 Playlist4

And then you are done. You can also download the complete Workflow.

  1. Safari 5, as I write this [↩]
  2. 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 [↩]
  3. 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. [↩]
  4. You want to create a specific playlist for these files in iTunes [↩]

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.

— @seankaiser

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.

Shell Loop Interaction with SSH

If you have a bash script with a while loop that reads from stdin and uses ssh inside that loop, the ssh command will drain all remaining data from stdin1. This means that only the first line of data will be processed.

I encountered this issue yesterday2. This website explains why the behavior occurs and how to avoid it.

A flawed method to run commands on multiple systems entails a shell while loop over hostnames, and a Secure Shell SSH connection to each system. However, the default standard input handling of ssh drains the remaining hosts from the while loop

from Shell Loop Interaction with SSH.

  1. This is not only true for ssh but for any command in the loop that reads from stdin by default [↩]
  2. I won’t go into details here, since it is for a very specialized purpose. I will say that it involved jot, ssh, an aging Solaris based network appliance, and some new fangly XML/Web 2.0 [↩]

iChat Notification with Growl

So there you are doing your work and of course being the geeks that we all are you have about three hundred windows open, give or take a few hundred. Then the iChat icon starts bouncing…

Now you might be very organized and have the iChat window in a certain spot on the screen or even on a certain space in Spaces. You might be a whiz with Exposé and immediately find the right iChat window in the myriad of windows that are open. Or you might have one or two 27″ displays and not really care about this.

But for the rest us, wouldn’t it be nice if say a small window floated into the screen with a notification and the person who sent the message and maybe even the message? And it would have to be unobtrusive and float away just as quickly. You could glance at the notification and decide there and then wether it is necessary to dig out that iChat window.

Incidentally, this is what Growl really does well.

This window will float serenely in front of everything for a few seconds.

And with the scripting interface in iChat it is fairly simple to set up. After installing Growl, take this script:

property growlAppName : "Growl iChat"

property notificationNames : {"Buddy Became Available", ¬
	"Buddy Became Unavailable", ¬
	"Message Received", ¬
	"Completed File Transfer"}
property defaultNotificationNames : {"Buddy Became Available", ¬
	"Buddy Became Unavailable", ¬
	"Message Received", ¬
	"Completed File Transfer"}

using terms from application "iChat"

	on buddy became available theBuddy
		my registerWithGrowl()

		tell application "iChat"
			tell theBuddy
				set theTitle to full name & " became available"
				set theDesc to status message
				set theIcon to image
			end tell
		end tell
		my notify(theTitle, theDesc, theIcon, "Buddy Became Available")
	end buddy became available

	on buddy became unavailable theBuddy
		my registerWithGrowl()

		tell application "iChat"
			tell theBuddy
				set theTitle to full name & " went away"
				set theDesc to status message
				set theIcon to image
			end tell
		end tell
		my notify(theTitle, theDesc, theIcon, "Buddy Became Unavailable")
	end buddy became unavailable

	on message received theText from theBuddy for theTextChat
		my registerWithGrowl()

		tell application "iChat"
			set theIcon to image of theBuddy
			set theTitle to full name of theBuddy
		end tell
		my notify(theTitle, theText, theIcon, "Message Received")
	end message received

	on completed file transfer theTransfer
		my registerWithGrowl()
		tell application "iChat"
			tell theTransfer
				if transfer status is finished then
					if direction is incoming then
						set theTitle to "Received File "
						set theDesc to "from "
					else
						set theTitle to "Sent File "
						set theDesc to "to "
					end if

					set theTitle to theTitle & (file as string)
					set theDesc to theDesc & full name of buddy
				end if
			end tell
		end tell
		my notify(theTitle, theDesc, theIcon, "Message Received")
	end completed file transfer
end using terms from

on registerWithGrowl()
	tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
		register as application growlAppName all notifications notificationNames default notifications notificationNames icon of application "iChat"
	end tell
end registerWithGrowl

on notify(theTitle, desc, icondata, notificationName)
	tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
		if icondata is "" or icondata is missing value then
			notify with name notificationName title theTitle description desc application name growlAppName icon of application "iChat"
		else
			notify with name notificationName title theTitle description desc application name growlAppName image icondata
		end if
	end tell
end notify

Copy the code into AppleScript Editor and save the file as “Growl iChat” (as a script file) in ~/Library/Scripts/iChat/

In iChat, go to Preferences -> Alerts and select the Event “Message Received”, check “Run Applescript” and choose “Growl iChat.scpt”

I also setup the script to react to “Buddy Becomes Available,” “Buddy Becomes Unavailable” and “File Transfer Completed.” The great thing is that you don’t have to enable all notifications. You can even set it up individually so that you get notifications for some buddies, but not others. It should be easy to adapt the script to more actions if you wanted to.