OTask: CLI for OmniFocus

I've been sitting on this one for a while, until I got a request from Patrick regarding an OmniFocus CLI and LaunchBar. I thought it might be time to dig this up and post it.

A reader named T

A Bash function for Markdown bloggers

I store all of my writing as separate Markdown files. A basic tagging system adds more "searchability," and I can quickly locate any file with Spotlight. Given the amount of time I spend in Te

Quick Tip: throttling parallel batch processes in Terminal

Quick tips are random posts regarding something I discovered on my way to something bigger. They usually get longer than "quick" would imply, for which I refuse to apologize.

It starts out wi

nvALT 2.1 progress report

Development on the next version of nvALT is going more slowly than I'd like, but some very cool changes are happening. In addition to implementing the latest changes and fixes from the main br

Duplicating Safari browsing sessions between Macs

Hey, you're just in time for another "stupid trick of the day" script. I have good reason for this one, and it only took me about 8 minutes to set up. It will take me longer to write about it

Automated HTML5 video encoding revisited

A little while ago I approached the subject of scripting automated encoding for HTML5 video formats. I started using the process regularly as I built the Blogsmith Bundle video site. Pretty so

A couple of TextMate Macros for Markdown lists

I was playing with the new TextMate Markdown bundle for MultiMarkdown 3 when I remembered an old nit I had with the list commands: no single-keystroke way to move list items up and down. Unles

Markdown QuickTags makes 1000 people happier and more attractive

I can't prove that anybody is happier, really, and attraction is entirely subjective. For all I know they were run off by the "invalid header" error and never even tried it out, but Markdown Q

Address Book search and Skype from the command line

Here's a neat little command-line utility for searching your address book: aboo. It's not complex... it just takes a single word or phrase and searches your Address Book entries' names for it.

nvALT 2.0: it's here

The long-promised 2.0 (yeah, I skipped 1.0.8) is finally here. Please download it here, as the application filename has changed to "nvALT" and Check for Updates won't work properly. It also us

AutoTag2: smarter tagging for TextMate and WordPress

I was tooling around the Vim website looking at blogging plugins this morning. I noticed that one of them, Vimpress, had linked to an old project of mine that allowed you to work with Ultimate

Mirror your Pinboard bookmarks with OpenMeta tags

Update [April 3rd, 2011]: The current version, 1.0.4 at the moment, has bugfixes for running without Tags.app installed, more error handling and a new setting for locations where the date form

Make CSSEdit use the latest Webkit nightly every time

If you're a web designer with a Mac, you probably use--or at least know of--CSSEdit. In it's heyday, it was the way to edit CSS. It's fallen a little out of repair; it doesn't recognize new se

Automating HTML5 video encodes

I spent an inordinate amount of time not doing useful things today. During this non-productivity bender, I got a little obsessed with making the HTML5 video encoding process easier. I've been

New: TextExpander downloads with custom prefixes

Hey, TextExpander users! Wanna see something cool? I made a little tool this morning to allow any of my TextExpander groups to be installed with your own custom prefix. You can now use whate

Additional Characters for TextExpander

Thanks to Thomas Borowski, the Characters group in my TextExpander project has been expanded to include Home, End, Control, Escape, Enter and Delete symbols. Check it out on the TextExpander p

Filesystem navigation with TextExpander

I just added a TextExpander group called "Filesystem" to my TextExpander project page. It's just a small set of paths that I find myself typing often in support emails, but here's the cool par

Project status report, March 2011

Here's where things are at, in case anyone was wondering:

Instapaper Beyond: I just sent an update to Apple this morning, and hope to have it approved shortly. It's a basic maintenance releas

Watch for file changes and refresh your browser automatically

After my epic three-part post on Saturday, I spent the rest of the weekend doing more "useful" things. Now it's Sunday night (Monday morning, I think), and I've got some kind of minor food poi

Grabbing a Mac app's icon: building blocks

I spent a few hours last night nerding out over an easy way to grab a Mac application's icon. I sent the basic Bash script and an example Automator action off to the other writers at TUAW. The

Grabbing a Mac app's icon: advanced Bash usage

In the previous post in this series, we looked at the basic Terminal commands we'd use to grab a Mac application's icon from the command line. In this post, we'll flesh out the script a little

Dynamic placeholder images, now with kittens

Thanks to Michael Jones for brightening an otherwise dull day for me. He pointed me to placekitten, a site that mimics placehold.it and inserts dummy images into HTML mockups for you. The diff

nvALT 1.0.8 progress and status

I know a lot of people are growing nervous about whether the promised version 1.0.8 of nvALT is actually going to reach fruition. It will. I'm not sure how much further I'll take this incarnat

Natural language date conversion for TextMate

I've been flirting with a plain-text to-do system again. The biggest problem for me is that a plain text system opens up so many possibilities for fiddling and scripting. I always end up fiddl

ImageMagick and GeekTool (or NerdTool)

This is going to be a relatively quick post, and it's definitely aimed at people who can already find their way around the command line, and probably have a little experience with GeekTool and

WordPress, custom taxonomy, and XML-RPC

This is a quick tip for anyone who may be searching for an answer to the question: "Is there any way to use XMLRPC to send custom post types to WordPress and attach custom taxonomy terms to th

Markdown snippets for TextExpander touch

It may come as a surprise to some (many), but I've never really made effective use of TextExpander on my iPad or iPhone (TextExpander touch). I don't do a lot of the things on my iPad which I

Meet Marky, the Markdownifier

I was featured on MacSparky.com today. Well, the home screen of my iPhone was, anyway. He mentioned a project of mine that I haven't actually had time to blog about yet, so here's a quick intr

Quick tip: running nvALT after a Notational Velocity update

Unimportant update: its an update, not an udpate. I need a headline proofreader.

If you've run the newest version of Notational Velocity, you may have noticed that you can no longer run nvALT

Dammit. Again with the Lipsum.

I know, I said I was done with the Lorem Ipsum generators. Then Dr. Drang responded with a brilliant solution which doesn't require Internet access to generate some beautiful dummy text. I set

One more time: TextExpander Lipsum snippets with kwisatz.hadera.ch

Ok, this is the last TextExpander Lipsum post, I promise (with my fingers crossed). I'm posting a full TextExpander group with all of the TextExpander random Lorem Ipsum generators I've post

LaunchBar actions for url encoding and decoding

I usually get up an hour or two before I start my work day and "play." Playtime usually results in half-finished scripts and deleted git branches, but sometimes I do something simple and usefu

TextExpander lipsum followup, with ice cream

It turns out it was me that was broken, not the Loremipscream API. That API can return just plain text, so the shell scripts are much more readable than trying to hack apart XML in Bash. You c

Quick calculations in Bash

This is probably going to seem stupid, but every time I decide to do something in Bash that should only take me a minute, I end up losing an hour. I obsess over "better" ways to do everything.

Random Lipsum for TextExpander

I hate it when I get an idea for something simple and end up spending an hour figuring out how to do it. I figured I'd make a post out of it to make myself feel better. It all started with my

Quick Tip: Multi-browser hotkey with Choosy

Riffing on my AppleScript to toggle an app between foreground and hidden, and inspired by Daniel Jalkut's script to toggle multiple Twitter apps, I wanted a way to do something similar with

Quick tip: AppleScript application toggle

From my hat full of stupid Mac tricks:

I use a lesser-known (and very old) program called Spark for defining most of the keyboard shortcuts on my system. I have a shortcut for every one of

nvALT 1.0.8 progress

I made a few breakthroughs on nvALT before bed last night, and I'm excited, so I thought I'd share. It's not ready for testing yet, but the following two features are working as initial implem

nvALT 1.0.7

A small update to fix a few problems I consider critical while I work on larger features. The big two changes are:

• Fix for typing delay when editing long notes with the Preview window open
• Pr

Bookmarklet: Read Pinboard links with Instapaper Text

Here's a quick bookmarklet you can run on any Pinboard page containing a list of bookmarks. It adds a "Read" link at the end of the edit links for each post, and clicking the link will open th

nvALT 1.0.5 (quick fixes)

Just a quick release to touch on a couple of bugs since yesterday's nvALT 1.0.4 release:

• Two-click process to share with peg.gd. (Prevent accidental sharing)
• Fix for white-on-white text when

nvALT 1.0.4: custom colors, social sharing

nvALT 1.0.4 introduces several new features and customizations.

Customizable notes list background color

This may eventually become a theme selector with multiple color prefs and a preset se

nvALT 1.0.3

nvALT 1.0.3 has been posted for automatic updates and direct download. If you're already running nvALT (formerly Notational Velocity ALT), just go to the application menu and choose "Check f

Speaking of Notational Velocity, did you know...

This is probably clearly documented somewhere, but it took me by surprise. If you have a full "attributed string" url in your clipboard (meaning you used ctrl-click "Copy Link") and you pop up

Notational Velocity ALT expatiation (and roadmap)

I'd just like to put it out there, as someone will eventually: Notational Velocity ALT (henceforth referred to as nvALT) is turning into something antithetical to the original premise of Notat

Notational Velocity ALT 1.0 release

After a few late nights of off-hours programming, I'm putting Notational Velocity ALT out as a version 1.0. Obviously built on the backs of others, I'm just giving it a versioning scheme of it

Notational Velocity ALT 5.3

As usual with projects I didn't plan to take as far as I did, my version numbering scheme is, well, stupid. With the next release I'm going to implement my own feed for automatic updates, so I

Notational Velocity alternative MultiMarkdown version

Updated: the download link on this page now goes to the fourth revision, more information here.

After my experiment last night, and finding DivineDominion's already-awesome fork of Notational

Lunch-break bugfixes for Notational Velocity ALT

I'm going to have to build a project page for this, and probably set up a separate Sparkle feed for updates on this fork. I had a few minutes while eating my peanut butter and jelly, so I'm po

Notational Velocity and MultiMarkdown

You might want to check out the alternative version (which is more recent).

Update: I was just informed (see comments) about another fork of Notational Velocity which has implemented MultiMar

Markdown QuickTags 0.7

Markdown QuickTags, my WordPress plugin which adds extensive Markdown features to the HTML editor, has been upped to 0.7. The download link has actually been incrementing for the last week, bu

SMS from the command line with Google Voice

I needed a script send an SMS today, and I found a very handy post at sudocode to send one via Google Voice, using PHP. I wanted to make it a little more command-line-friendly, so I rewrote it

Markdown QuickTags: WordPress plugin for Markdown lovers

Introducing Markdown Quicktags, a new WordPress plugin for Markdown lovers! If you edit your blog in Markdown, whether you publish that way or not, this plugin will make your life almost 37% b

Edit your WordPress QuickTags the right way

You may have cause, at some point, to modify the behavior of the QuickTags in the HTML editor of WordPress (the non-WYSIWYG, non-"Visual" editor). There are a lot of tutorials available for ed

VoodooPad log navigation plugins

These VoodooPad Script Plugins are the result of two opposing traits of mine: laziness and curiosity. Laziness because, well, why should I have to move my hand all the way over to my mouse to

Pully: jQuery plugin for automatic pull quotes

Demo - Download

Another quick experiment. Honestly, I don't use pluggable functions in jQuery nearly as much as I should, so this is really just a brain exercise to get myself used to it. Thi

TabLinks 2.0 is live

Apparently I missed the memo: TabLinks 2.0 was actually approved by Apple in September. I've been sitting on my hands and just recently bothered to write them and ask what was up. Miscommunica

TextExpander: bit.ly with authentication

A quick script in response to Donald's query on my TextExpander Experiments post. He wanted to know if I could make the bit.ly script—which expands to a bit.ly-shortened version of a ur

Things tasks from the command line

If you're a Things.app user (and a Terminal user), I've got a quick function for your .bash_profile that will allow you to quickly add todo items to your inbox with notes and natural-language

PromptDown for iOS: Mobile Markdown Teleprompter

I recently wrote a tiny web app called PromptDown to let me drop in some Markdown (or plain text) and use it as a teleprompter for screencast voiceovers. I wasn't going to put any more time in

Look, I made you a Markdown teleprompter

Be sure to check out version 2, with iOS support (iPhone/iPad)!

Here's my stupid trick of the day: a Markdown teleprompter called PromptDown (I see what you did there...). The idea was to

Answer Skype with a hotkey

If you use Skype and happen to be as clumsy as I am, you may have run into this at some point: you see a call come in, you fumble for your headset, you go back to your mouse, find the cursor o

HomeControl: Local Mac control for iPhone

I tried out a tip recently for controlling a Mac via Mobile Safari on your iPhone, and it got me thinking, which is often dangerous. I put together this little web app today as a proof of conc

Clear sticky Growl notifications with a keyboard shortcut

I ran into a question yesterday that didn't seem to have an obvious answer: how can I clear a stack of sticky Growl notifications using only the keyboard. It's not been any secret that I'm a f

TabLinks 2.0

TabLinks 2.0 is finished, and it's a total rewrite. The changes have been submitted to Apple, and if all goes well, TabLinks will be updated in the Extensions Gallery shortly. Here's an overvi

Automated search and link text Service

I've had this one laying around for a long time, so I thought I'd toss it out on the 'net and see if anyone else had a use for it. It's actually really handy, and a big timesaver. It takes sel

Taskpaper Date Scripts

4 quick scripts for TaskPaper users tonight, specifically for handling dates quickly. If you've used my other TaskPaper scripts, you know you can use natural language to set start and due date

Evernote Site Memory tagger for WordPress

Evernote introduced Site Memory today, providing an easy way to help people clip to Evernote from your site while maintaining control over how your content appears and is attributed. While som

A TextMate Command for fast abbr tags

I'm on a roll with stupid scripts today, but it's Saturday... so, whatever. This is a quick command for creating semantic <abbr> tags in TextMate. It's short, but pretty smart: if your text is

A Quick VoodooPad Script Plugin - Go To Today

This script may not be of use to many people, but I'm finding it so handy today that I figured I'd post it in the hopes that someone who needs it finds it. It's really only useful to people w

Is your URL too short? Try our system, free!

I was sifting through my previous blog after Jeffery Zeldman kindly sent a lot of visitors in that direction for some TextMate starter tips. Whilst milling around, I stumbled upon an old trick

A quick TextMate KeyBindings tip

I love the keyboard, and I love keyboard shortcuts. It's one of the reasons TextMate and I get along so well. There's one thing that bothers me any time I'm editing text (in any application),

GReader Instapaper 0.2

I just pushed a tiny little update to the GReader Instapaper extension. It shortens the default speed at which the notifications disappear, and adds a settings item in preferences so you can a

Placeholder image TextMate Snippet

Yesterday, I posted a quick TextExpander snippet for inserting placeholder images into an HTML layout using placehold.it. I took a minute today to convert this to a TextMate snippet as well, a

Instant placeholder images with TextExpander

When designing for the web, placeholder images can come in handy during initial layout, and even during wireframing, if you happen to wireframe in markup. I've been using a TextExpander snipp

Single-keystroke Instapaper in Google Reader

This was a quick plugin I put together last night when I got too frustrated to work on my actual jobs. It lets you define a single shortcut key which, after you input your Instapaper username

Instapaper Beyond 1.8.9

Instapaper Beyond version 1.8.9 is another small release with a couple of usability enhancements. Thanks to everyone who's been submitting ideas and bugs, I'll do my best to keep up!

This rel

Instapaper Beyond 1.8.7

Update: I just pushed out version 1.8.8 with a minor fix for some spacebar-in-forms issues. The download link and auto-update file have already been updated. Thanks to John P for the bug repor

Fixing Gleebox

If you haven't tried it, gleeBox is an amazing extension. I have it installed in my Firefox and Chrome setups, and I'm more than thrilled that it's finally available for Safari. It lets you do

Instapaper Beyond: fix for text style controls

This is a bugfix release of Instapaper Beyond for Safari which brings the version up to 1.8.6. It fixes a few visual glitches, but most importantly it restores the functionality of the text st

EverSave revisited, now with session restore!

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 extensi

Better WordPress security through comment filters

I have an admin username (it's not admin) which I use to manage my WordPress blog, and an editor user with which I write posts and leave comments. Sometimes, though, I get confused, lazy or bo

Minor TabLinks update

I just posted version 1.3 of TabLinks. It doesn't fix all of the things I eventually want to fix, but it does do some rudimentary entity encoding that allows you to actually use HTML tags in t

Visually differentiating your development site

I have most of the websites I work on set up with separate development (usually local) and production/deployment servers. It's pretty easy to keep straight when I'm first designing a site, b

TextMate drag command for Base64 encoding images

Just a quick hit on this one... when hacking away at the styles of things one probably shouldn't be hacking away at, embedding images right in the CSS is a handy trick. It's done by Base64 enc

TabLinks Safari Extension

TabLinks is a quick experiment, designed to meet my own needs. It needs some work, but it does the trick: it copies the link information for every tab open in Safari, and outputs them as a l

RedirectBuster, another late night Safari Extension

Okay, this one has a little refining left to go, but it seems to be working pretty flawlessly. I ported most of the code from a greasemonkey script. All I really want to add is a toolbar item

Antique 1.6, final release

For a quick "how-to" on using the Antique (or any) Safari Reader hack, see the related article in the HowTo section.

This will be the last release of Antique, I think, barring a few minor f

Ampersands & Javascript

While playing around with Antique, I decided I really wasn't in love with the ampersands that were included in any of the fonts I was working with. Normally, I'd just run everything through Ty

Antique 1.5 for Safari Reader

There is a new version of Antique available! Check out version 1.6!

Version 1.5 1.6 of Antique (originally posted here) is officially available for download. Here's what's new!

• jQuery: adde

Safari Reader Antique hack

There is a new version of Antique available! Check out version 1.6!

I was thrilled when it was first announced that someone had located the HTML/CSS for the new Safari Reader functionality

Antique Safari Reader hack update with Evernote goodness

I updated the links and information on the main post, but I thought I'd put a little ping out there for RSS readers who might want to upgrade:

Evernote web clipper functionality is now comple

Instapaper Beyond for Safari

The Instapaper Beyond Extension now has it's own page. Check it out!

Instapaper Beyond is officially available as a Safari 5 extension! For Safari users new to Instapaper Beyond, it's an exte

Instapaper Beyond Bugs (fixed)

I've found a few bugs in Instapaper Beyond since releasing the Safari extension this morning. I've updated the extension to version 1.8.3, but I'm not convinced that my update manifest (the au

Minor update to Instapaper Beyond (1.4)

Instapaper Beyond users will want to type "U" in their Instapaper SSB to update to version 1.4. It includes a minor update that improves bottom-of-page detection when using the spacebar.

Styl

Fun with MarsEdit, part I

I'll be the first to admit that I get a little obsessed with projects that aren't really going to improve my life all that much. Those projects can be fun to blog about, though, so I present y

Instapaper Beyond 1.3

I just pushed out a fairly large update for Instapaper Beyond, my little userscript for Fluid which adds extensive keyboard navigation and additional functionality to the Instapaper website. I

Auto-lightboxing image links

I ran into a problem recently. I wanted to have links to images be "lightboxed," but I also wanted to blog in Markdown and not have to write out link tags with "rel" attributes for every image

Delicious, Spotlight and OpenMeta tags, revisited

I've taken a little time to improve the script I'd posted previously. It saves bookmarks you add to Delicious as webloc (Safari bookmark) files on your local hard drive, optionally with thumbn

Delicious bookmarks and OpenMeta tags

There are quite a few things I love when it comes to my Mac. I love Spotlight. I love OpenMeta tagging. I love Evernote. I love being able to collect information from any source, and find anyt

A few scripts for TaskPaper users

I've been using Things for task management lately, mostly because it has a decent iPad app. I really do love my iPad... however, I often use TaskPaper from Hog Bay Software for weekend to-do l

TextExpander experiments

I've seen a few people around the 'net sharing their TextExpander snippets, so I thought I'd join in. Not familiar with TextExpander? It's a Mac utility that expands short snippets into full t

A System Service for to. url shortening

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),

A big upgrade for Instapaper Beyond

I just got back from a week-long "Code Jam" that was all business, all week, so I took a Saturday to work on some personal projects. Instapaper beyond 1.1 is out, and I'd love to hear some fee

Adding a TinyMCE button to Wordpress

I was working on a quick website for my wife, and trying to make things as simple as possible for both of us. For me, I just wanted to give her a flexible template that I didn't have to hack m

Instapaper Beyond for Fluid.app

Introducing Instapaper Beyond, an Instapaper userscript for Fluid that provides full keyboard navigation and some special features for browsing your Instapaper articles. If you're not familiar

Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service

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 f

Save Safari tabs to Instapaper

I posted a way to save your Safari tabs to Evernote, which I've found is generally a great way to save bookmarks. It syncs automatically to your other computers and your iPhone, and it's fast

Saving Safari browsing sessions to Evernote

I primarily use Safari for web browsing, mostly because it's smoother and faster than Firefox, and the Web Inspector is just as useful as Firebug. As time passes, I end up with a lot of web pa

fk: redux

Just a quick change to my post on the bash function fk that I've been using. A small modification has greatly improved its usability: make the cancel option always be first in the menu. Just m

A better System Service for Evernote clipping - with MultiMarkdown

Update: If you're looking for a Markdown -> Evernote, check this out.

Another post, quickly and with less explanation...

The fact that Evernote processes HTML so much better than it does pla

A (fairly) simple equation evaluation service for Snow Leopard

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 t

Clippable updated to remove source code line numbers

I made a couple of minor changes to the Clippable bookmarklet, mostly in the way it handles SyntaxHighlighter code blocks. The SyntaxHighlighter plugin is used (too) often to format and color

My new favorite Bash prompt

I do a lot in Terminal. Sometimes, it's easier. Sometimes it's faster. Sometimes I'd just rather type it out. Whatever the reason, I've never been able to stand looking at a boring shell prom

fk: a useful bash function

This is a function from my OS X .bash_profile. 'fk' is short for Find and Kill, and it lets you do a quick search of your running processes for a case-insensitive partial match of the first pa

Songza Lucky Link Service

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 l

Clippable to Evernote Snow Leopard Service

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

Clippable

11.03.09 Renaming Readable2 to Clippable, I think. At least that's what it's going to be on the code page, for now.

The Clippable bookmarklet can be found here.

The original Readability book