Control Option Command

A short while ago I wrote about my disappointment with the O’Reilly iPhone apps. The other day I noticed that three of the four titles I originally bought had an update. I’ve finally had time to have a look at them and I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised.

The 1.1 versions are infinitely more readable but also feels a lot more responsive. The code isn’t breaking lines as often and not in such awful ways when it is.

Making code properly formatted on the iPhone is hard, and there’s still room for improvement but these new versions certainly wouldn’t have prompted me to write angry blog posts.
Thanks O’Reilly.

I noticed that my little app for migrating your data from Things to The Hit List still gets some hits. I haven’t really looked at it for ages, but I wasn’t terribly surprised to see that it’s broken under Snow Leopard.

I decided to fix it, expecting AppleScript projects in Xcode to work pretty much the same that they did before, and brother was I mistaken.

It seems that Apple decided AppleScript as a simple to grasp scripting language really has no place in Xcode anymore, and Cocoafied the bejeezus out of it. On the surface using the new Cocoa / AppleScript bridge feels like playing a nazi in most hollywood war movies. You’re still speaking English (Cocoa), just with a horrible German (AppleScript) accent.

The Migrator is just a little quick and dirty utility app, which AppleScript is perfect for, but rewriting this for 10.6 I felt I might as well have ported it to Cocoa (since I’m in the process of learning Objective C anyway). I didn’t though. I hacked my way through it using the Bridge, and I felt like Xcode was berating me the whole time.

I’m excited about Cocoa and Objective-C, but I loved AppleScript for what it was. I’m still going to be using AppleScript a lot, but unless I “See the light” of the Cocoa Bridge, I don’t think I’ll be making any GUI apps with it anymore. I also find it telling that there seems to be no documentation for the Cocoa / AppleScript Bridge except for the release notes that I can find.

Rant over.

Disclaimer:

• This works fine for me. I make no guarantees that it’ll work for you. I think it will, and I’ll try to help you out if it doesn’t, but I’m not liable if your Mac explodes.
• Caution: If you check the “Delete items from Things” option your items will be deleted from Things.
• In order for this to work the app will empty your Things trash can regardless. If you really need the stuff in the Things trash can, perhaps it shouldn’t be in the trash.
• I don’t have a Leopard machine handy, so I haven’t tested the Leopard version since I first posted it in May. It worked then, so it should work now.

Github
App – Leopard
Source Code – Leopard
App – Snow Leopard
Source Code – Snow Leopard

To whom it may concern.

I have for years been a satisfied customer of O’Reilly. I’ve bought and enjoyed several books from you both as dead tree paperbacks and downloadable PDFs.
To my chagrin I also bought a number of titles on the iTunes app store once I found out that you publish a selection of your books as standalone apps there. I’m sad to report that I found these apps to be rather disappointing. In fact they are complete and utter crap.


It’s apparent that what you have done is to adopt the Stanza engine and stripped it down to contain one book per instance. Unless you’ve reinvented an already triangular wheel it also seems that you simply process your Safari PDFs through the downloadable helper app and then push the results to the app store.

Look; Stanza is a great e-book reader when it comes to downloading and reading “Frankenstein” as a Public Domain EPub book. And if you have some totally-not-copyrighted PDF you want to get onto your iPhone the desktop Stanza app does a tolerable job of ripping the file to HTML and reflowing it to read nicely on the small display, but converting PDFs with Stanza in this manner is, undeniably, a hack. It’s a workaround to get a PDF meant for a big screen unto a small screen, no questions asked.

Stanza is admittedly a pretty good solution to get a book onto the iPhone, a few formatting issues aside. There is however a considerable difference between reading a novel and feeling slightly irked because the chapter titles don’t show up in bold and reading a book on programming where half of the code is illegible, broken, or overflows beyond the page and into oblivion.

Read the rest of this article »

Edit: I updated the app to work on Snow Leopard. Go here to get the app or source code.

So this all started out with me pining for the release of the fabled iPhone version of The Hit List. I started out just wanting to create a script that would let me use Things Touch to gather tasks when I was out and about and then transfer them to The Hit List and delete them from things. Seeing how I already had a license for Things this seemed to be my best option for the time being. (Sorry Appigo Todo. It’s not you, it’s me.)

So this is all just exposition, because:
1. It’s too klugey a way of going about this to actually be useful
And 2. it’s easier to achieve almost as good a result by just syncing through iCal.

So now I’m sitting here with a heap of useless code and decided to see if I could repurpose it to do some good.
I present to you the Things Migrator. This is a small app that does one thing only. It grabs all of your to-dos from Things and migrates them over to The Hit List.

Now, not all of the same metaphors apply in The Hit List as they do in Things, so some of the data will inevitably be lost or confuddled. Below is a short summary of how the migrator will treat the different kinds of data.
Tags are transformed into /Tags or /Multi word tags/, Projects become Lists and you can map Areas into /Tags, /Area name tags/ or @contexts.

Issues that may or may not be improved upon:

• It’ll only migrate open tasks and it’ll ignore Things’ “activation date”, “creation date”, and pretty much anything to do with “per sons”.
• Links to local files will not be read. I can’t figure out how to decode the stupid HEX-string I get into a proper path. Instead the script will insert a note alerting you to the fact that somehting’s missing.
• URL links will for now show up as the full HTML link, i.e. <a href="http://ctrloptcmd.com">my link</a>. I’m sure it’s easily fixable, but it’ll have to wait until I know if anyone at all wants it seeing how this string parsing in AppleScript is getting on my balls.
• It is, as mentioned before, a one way street. There’s no syncing back to Things from THL per now, and I don’t know if there ever will.

Please note that this is experimental stuff and I take no responsibility for crap that may happen!

That said, it seems to work pretty well and you can download the application (with a nice GUI) or the full XCode project here.

Comments and feedback is always appreciated.

Do you use any Adobe products? Tell me if this sounds familiar: “Oh hai! I need to update some totally unrelated stuff on your machine! You know, some camera raw stuff or InDesign whatchamacallits, so I’m just going to force you to quit all your browsers, because lordy lordy who knows what might happen if you coincidentally were looking at interwebs while I was installing this shit. Woohoo!”

Yes… The old adobe installer/updater. Let me count the ways I hate you. Quite a few! So, more out of spite than anything else I started checking out what browsers might not be sniffed up by the dreaded ugly beast that is the Adobe Installer/Updater. Turns out they’ve been thorough. Fluid gets away with it, but it’s really not that great for anything but site-specific stuff (which it was made for, and indeed does very well).

So in the end I wrote my own web browser, and of course I did it in AIR (Adobe Integrated AIR Runtime… RAS!).
So let me advice you; This is NOT a good browser, and it is NOT much of a feat to have written it, but it WILL work during an Adobe installation does its thing, and it IS fucking hillarious to use Adobe technology to subvert Adobe technology.

The source is available in the app itself, and you’ll notice that I’ve used this guys styles to pretty it up a bit. Knock yourself out if it takes your fancy. If you install the app you’ll get a very basic browser. A URL field, back and forward history buttons and a search field. Impressively it seems to remember your logins from other browsers, which is not my doing at all. Clicky clicky badgy badgy to install.