saulrosenbaum.com / mac

Search your remote Library and create a playlist based on your search - and of course play your playlist, knowledge gleaned from Doug and Rory

-- you'll want to set this line to reflect your remote machine info
set remoteMachine to "eppc://username:password@machinename.local"
set keyword to "Gogol Bordello"
display dialog "Search:" default answer keyword
set vol to text returned of the result
using terms from application "iTunes"
	tell application "iTunes" of machine remoteMachine
		set my_search_results to (search library playlist 1 for keyword)
		if my_search_results is not {} then
			set myList to make new playlist with properties {name:keyword}
			set sel to a reference to my_search_results
			repeat with aTrack in sel
				set thisTrack to (get location of aTrack)
				set dbid to (get database ID of aTrack)
				add thisTrack to myList
			end repeat
			set currentList to playlist keyword
			play the playlist named keyword
			reveal current track
		end if
	end tell
end using terms from

Two obvious TODO’s in my code - it doesn’t do muchANY error checking so although iTunes does seemed to care if you have multiple playlists sharing a name (meaning it doesn’t overwrite them) THAT might not be what you’re intention. I’ll probably be fixing that at a later date. Lastly it doesn’t offer any feedback - which I suppose is fine, but not very me so I’ll probably add some GROWL notification in regards to if the playlist was created and how many tracks were added.

Again really just scratching the surface here, and Doug & Rory did all the heavy lifting on this one.

I’ve blogged about Alfred once before, it’s a great little launcher - the fact that it uses Spotlight comments to tag/exclude/group apps and files for launching is IMHO it’s killer feature - being able to group all your tools AND files/documents together makes Alfred a awesome workflow tool, but I’m not here to talk about work, well not exactly - take a look at the pic at the top of this post - 6 small apps (whose code I gleaned from here), each app controls playback and volume of my Jukebox G4 Laptop, all linked together with the spotlight keyword ‘JUKE’ those combined with GROWL makes for a really powerful combination, I can control every aspect of playback of the jukebox - and get feedback as to what’s currently playing without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. I wasn’t able to find that exact Functionality anywhere else, and because I run Alfred and Growl anyway there’s ZERO OVERHEAD.

This only really scratches the surface of what’s doable, so stayed tuned. At some point in the future I’m sure Alfred will allow us to pass arguments to scripts (ala Launchbar) at that point I’ll write scripts that Spotlight tags selected files into Alfred groups, and the universe will recursively collapse upon itself.

(Icons by David Lanham)

Recently I switched my launcher of choice to ‘Alfred’ a nifty indie project that I became aware of via Twitter, in the past I’ve been both a Quicksilver and LaunchBar user - both extremely powerful apps that although I used them religiously, each had quirks I never could really get past (QS had stability issues, LB was stable but I never wrapped my head around it’s particular method of bringing back results, and it wasn’t going to win any beauty pageants)

Alfred is in beta, but seems stable, visually pretty, and actively developed (which I really appreciate) - And has most of the features you’d want in a launcher - but I want to talk about a single feature, that I really like, Alfred’s use of spotlight comments allows you to create groups of essentially unrelated apps, it’s so simple, so obvious (and honestly it may have worked with LaunchBar too, but I never checked) just add your desired key work to all the apps you want in a group and BOOM! done - I add ‘webd’ to Transmit, Coda, Textmate, Cssedit and Espresso and evoke Alfred and it just works, you can assign as many keywords to an app as you want, for example I add ‘ftp’ to transmit as well.

It’s a simple feature I really appreciate, and we all know how hard simple actually is. So if you’re in the market for a nifty, pretty, deceptively powerful launcher that’s only going to get better - take a look at Alfred.

For the past 6 months I’ve had this interesting mac issue - once or twice a month my internal drive which generally has about 90GB free on it would drop to 25GB free or less, I originally thought perhaps the drive was dying because rebooting off a system dvd and repairing the drive generally fixed it - about a week ago - that fix stopped working, and I thought hmm.. maybe something just isn’t cleaning up after itself - since we’re talking about 65GB I immediately thought it must be iPhoto/Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks since it’s pretty unlikely coda/textmate/expresso (and YES I use all three) ever use that much of anything - so I dug deeper, I have a demo of DaisyDisk hanging around that showed me my ‘CodeEquivalenceDatabase’ (which lives in: var/db) file was 64GB - it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it was likely that file was the problem - but I wasn’t sure, maybe that file was supposed to be that big - some more googling and that file is tied directly to 1password and keychain - I ran repair ‘keychain’ BOOM crashed/reboot/won’t restart/lovely - reboot again and it came back - some more googling led me to believe I could just delete ‘CodeEquivalenceDatabase’ and it would be regenerated, so I did - and it was, the new file was 16k UNTIL I launched Transmit, it seems that every time I launch Transmit the file doubles in size - I suppose that might shed some light on how often I launch Transmit (I’d love for someone to do that math).

Conclusion

I deleted Transmit and reinstalled, and the problem seems to have gone away, it’s important to mention that it’s highly unlikely this was a Transmit problem, it more likely that it was just a very ugly anomaly on my machine, I haven’t experienced anything like this on any other system.

So I’ve been twitting for a short time, Like so many people I downloaded ‘Twittererific’ and have been happily twitting away - it’s a solid sexy little app, and honestly I would expect nothing less from the guys at iconfactory, they rock, and rock hard. Given my recent love affair with the shell, I realized last night that I could easily leverage Launchbar to be my twitting tool of choice; twitters API is simple and concise.

curl --basic --user "USERNAME:PASSWORD" --data-ascii ¬
"status=YOUR DESIRED TWIT" " ¬
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"

So to tie that to Launchbar we simply add the argument passed (your typed status) from launchbar into the script, save it in ‘\bin’ CHMOD it executable, and bind it to a search template

curl --basic --user "USERNAME:PASSWORD" --data-ascii ¬
"status=$1" "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"

That’s all it really takes to post, how simple is that?, of course to get your friends status it’ll take a bit more, I’m thinking ‘geektool’ is the right tool for that job, but that’s a different post (hopefully tomorrow).

Tagged: api, shell, twitter

I’m forever fiddling with online ‘organizers’ one of the nicest IMHO is Backpack by those 37 signals guys, it’s clean and straightforward - and while I doubt I’ll ever actually use it for my day-to-day masterlist, it’s an excellent place to jot down some quick notes - till I can transcribe them into the ‘uber’ paper list that rules my waking hours (yes..paper, I confess, I kill trees, regularly)

So my recent insomnia had me poking at the BackPack API - to see if I could easily marry BackPack to Launchbar which is my preferred launcher du-jour (whole other post needed as to my choosing it over QS) Natively launchbar supports applescript (which I hate writing), and it also supports Shell scripts (which I love writing) so that choice was simple.

BackPack’s API uses XML over HTTP - which I found annoying (which means I couldn’t get it to work) but Backpack also has a email interface - which is cake. I create a shell script named ‘createTODO’ and parked it in my bin directory. I CHMOD’d it executable.

#!/bin/bash

E="address@yourpage.backpackit.com"
S="Subject: todo: $1"
echo $S | sendmail -f youremail@domain.com $A

that’s the nuts and bolts of it really. it’s clean, simple, bulletproof - you don’t even need to worry about your API key, tested with some static content, boooyah! step one done.

Now to connect that to LB it’s so easy it’s sick..
Open your LB Configuration and create a new search template, give it a simple to type name (like TD)
and make the detail is (Note the linebreak ¬)

x-launchbar:execute? ¬
path=/bin/createTODO&arguments="*"

Using it is as easy as;
Trigger LB, type ‘TD’ hit space. type your task/note and hit enter DONE!

I created a similar script and template for Backpack notes, I’m pretty sure you can figure that one out. Maybe the next version will use applescript and have Growl feedback… hmm.

I was looking for a way to drop bookmarks to email threads in Mail.app‡ when I stumbled upon Hallon a VERY cool open-source project by Peter Borg (of Smultron fame), it’s exactly what I was looking for and SO MUCH MORE.

Peter does a much better job describing it than me.

Hallon can create bookmarks in many applications (like iTunes or Mail.app) that usually can’t create bookmarks and they are always accessible from a menu whatever you are doing. You can e.g. bookmark your favorite songs, an email that you have to reply to later that day, some documents that you are working on or the contact information of a friend whom you need to call before the end of the week. And you play the song, open the email, the document or the contact information just by choosing the bookmark in the Hallon menu.

IMHO most software is for the most part derivative, Hallon rings unique, filling a void that most people don’t even realize the have. The ability to jump back into an email thread, an address, a playlist, and set reminders and notes as well is great for anyone who deals with an unreasonable amount of information on a daily basis.

‡ I knew this was possible because my brief exposure to iGTD did this perfectly, iGTD was an excellent program in it’s own right, just not a great fit for me.

Hallon

I’m a pretty heavy gSuite user(gmail,calendar,docs) for the most part I’m fine using them in a browser, my browser of choice happens to be Safari, When I got a chance to try the then beta Mailplane out, I jumped at it, it’s not bad, it made managing my five gmails accounts pretty painless, and the drag and drop file attachments was interesting, but ultimately it’s just a browser with a few sexy tricks, and I don’t think those tricks justify the soon-to-be 24 dollar price tag. So I needed an alternative..of course Safari is perfectly fine, and 40% of the time that’s what I use even when Mailplane was open, but searching I went anyway.

Hana is interesting in a laughable way - if you turn off safari’s address bar, hide the bookmark bar - you have hana, it offers not a single differentiator over Safari - other than no navigation, but wait….it’s $19.91, I nearly laughed myself sick… I can only assume they paid a bunch for the sassy icon.

So I won’t be using Hana, but I found a gem in my travels, Webmail.app, a little bit of webkit, served up by Michael McCracken, it only does gmail, it’s devoid of sexy tricks, and it’s rock freekin solid, I’d love for it to deal with my five gmail accounts, but I may solve that problem differently.

Webmail.app really shines when you set it as the ‘compose’ app via G-Mail notifier, that marries the menubar display with Webmail’s single-minded approach.

I suppose eventually i will have tried every application the world has to offer, here’s two more I can strike off my list.

So I’ve had my iPhone for about 48 hours - I’m a bit torn about it, it’s a great ipod, it’s a tremendous mobile browser, it’s a darn nice 2 MegaPixel camera - but honestly it’s just an okay phone - 70% of my issues revolve around the form factor - it’s thin, slippery and awkward, it’s got zero tactility (is that a word?) the top feels pretty much like the bottom, so it’s more than a little awkward to fiddle with in the car unless you actually stop to look at it… I don’t want to write a long form review, it’s been done to death - I’ll just mention a few things that jump out at me.

• Mobile Safari - excellent, especially if a site is designed to accommodate it (FYI - this column width - kicks ass on the iPhone).
• Ipod - clean & elegant, Apple continues to impress me with their ability to restrain themselves feature-wise.
• Keyboard - I was concerned, I have somewhat ‘sausage’esqe’ fingers but I seem to have no issues whatsoever - for the most part error free.
• Calendar - the little dots to signify events is just weak - ‘Steve’ get the ipod UI team to look at the calendar UI… NO TASKS!, um 2007!
• Maps - Not hugely impressed YET, but as soon as some smart programmer hacks some GPS software to triangulate your position based on overlapping wifi coverage - the map integration could get very nice, very fast.
• Clock - (seriously) very nice UI, Timer has the single most gratuitous UI on the whole iPhone.
• Notes - Did we really need the legal pad metaphor? I’m a tad insulted.
• YouTube - the video looks amazing..simply amazing.
• Edge - Not fast, not slow - when I’m in the middle of nowhere I don’t care that it’s slow.

Like I said it’s a great little toy gadget - am I glad I bought it? Sure, I’m a UI designer and a web developer, and a 19+ year mac user - and buying myself an iphone was a no-brainer, am I going to miss my old cell phone? probably, but only when I’m on the phone.

Tagged: iphone

I know I’m going to get serious flack from my buddy Larry on this… I switched to Apple mail tonight - from Thunderbird, I think that’s officially my 4th email client in 6 years, eat time moving several 100,000 emails each time - it’s been VERY painful, and time consuming, and stressful.

So the question I’m sure your asking is why?, well the answer is pretty simple - Thunderbird is a pig, a slow, quirky and not very enjoyable to use pig - but those aren’t the real reason - more and more of the apps that I use and depend on are natively integrating with mail and ical (and the like) and I finally decided to take the plunge - and really it wasn’t much of a plunge really - on my 24”MacIntel Imac - mail.app screams - smart folders behave just like real folders, last time I tried mail.app those smart folders where anything but snappy. Spotlight support in my email is an interesting experience..not FAST FAST, but easily Thunderbird Fast.
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