splee.blog

For those that aren’t up on the the news, MacHeist has officially started. I can’t really divulge much information about the site itself as it’s shrouded itself in mystery, but I can say this: It’s quite a lot of fun. :)

I have 7 invites on my account to give away and one will go to each of the first 7 people who comment on this post who express an interest in getting their grubby mitts on one. Note, that you’ll want to have a Mac to take advantage of your account… but that’s probably quite obvious from the name of the site, right?

Recently I’ve become much enamoured with AppleScript. All those little things you wish you could simplify or do automatically can be made a reality with this wonderful tool.

I’ve also started using del.icio.us after much procrastinating; I’ve been meaning to store and tag my bookmarks somewhere other than on my browser toolbar as they are starting to get a little unmanageable.

In my quest to further remove my need for the mouse, I looked into a handy app to add to my del.icio.us bookmarks straight from Safari. I couldn’t quite find what I was looking for. I did find a very simple but very neat app for creating bookmarks which can be scripted using AppleScript: Pukka.

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This morning was my first foray into the world of Applescript, and it was surprisingly painless. My basic need was to have a key shortcut for each of three tasks that I do continuously in Mail in a semi-GTD fashion:

• Mark a message as Unread and move it to my @Action folder
• Mark a message as Unread and move it to my @Hold folder
• Move a message to my @Archive folder

After a little research I found various scripts that did small parts of these tasks from which I gleaned my first working scripts for Mail.app.

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There’s only one thing so far that’s bugging me about OSX and the apps that rely on it. American English.

I don’t want to write in Americanese, I want to write in proper english, thank you very much. I don’t drop that ‘u’ from colour, I don’t spell apologise or realise with a ‘z’, and I don’t do any of the other little things that differentiate our supposedly common language.

Obviously, I’ve started teaching that little dotted red line the error of its ways, but is there any way to install a British English dictionary on OS X? I’ve not found a way as yet, but surely Apple have foreseen this eventuality… haven’t they? Or are they simply hoping to avoid confusion by forcing us brits to spell “the right way”?

Any insights will be much appreciated, as Google’ing this hasn’t revealed anything of note.

For those of you out there who have your shiny Mac, but have never used Quicksilver… what rock have you been hiding under!?

As it is, I love Quicksilver and I’m not sure how I could live without it. There’s certainly nothing that comes close to it in terms of functionality on Windows. Sure, there’s the odd app that covers some of Quicksilver’s features, but never the whole lot.

However, it seems I’ve been using it without realising the application’s full potential. Howard Melman has produced a nice manual that helps a lot more than the plain Quicksilver Docs as it’s written in plain english with examples. Howard’s manual certainly helped me to realise QS’ features and what I was missing. Give it a read, I guarantee you’ll enjoy QS even further.

This is just too cool. Visor is from the people who brought you the wonderous app that is Quicksilver and, while I’ve only been using it for less than a day, It’s made my life that little bit brighter.

Visor basically impliments a “Quake” style terminal dropdown. ^F1 by default toggles the slidie-outie terminal goodness, but it can be assigned any key combo that you desire.

I use the terminal a lot in my day to day work and have a Quicksilver trigger set up for it, but having the window so easily hideable without losing the window’s state is so very handy. I do of course still have a few other terminal windows open, but for the quick’n'dirty commands that need to be run, Visor is indispensible.

Unfortunately, it’s only available for OSX 10.4 and upwards. Those of you still on Panther are missing out.