Quickly whitelist sites in Kill-Flash

7/06/2010

Is it hypocritical of me to write about a Flash blocker when I’ve spent a good portion of my time the last four years doing Flash? Maybe, but some of the sites out there have ridiculous amounts of intrusive and annoying banner ads, and I just can’t stand having my the fans on my Mac blowing a fuse every time I want to check out the news.

My favorite implementation of Flash-blocking has always been ClickToFlash which is a Safari-only plugin that works exactly as advertised. You click the element to load Flash. Sadly, as mentioned, it’s Safari-only and my browser of choice these days is Google Chrome.

Jason 128Fortunately I found a port, or perhaps a backwards engineered version for Chrome named, somewhat more aggressively, Kill-Flash. It works on exactly the same principle. All Flash elements are replaced with an inconspicuous grey-scale gradient with the label “Flash”, and you “Click To Flash”… Duh.

Stupidly however, I have found no simple way to add sites to the plugins whitelist. A few sites (YouTube and GMail) are whitelisted by default, but no option that I’ve found to add new sites. There are several sites I visit on a regular basis and where I want to see the Flash. Hell, my own blog uses several (subtle, I hope) Flash elements and I don’t need to see those grey boxes every time I come here. In fact, personally I think perhaps a “blacklist mode” would be my preferred way to operate.

So, anyway. I started digging around in the Library to figure out how to add sites to the whitelist. The first issue of course is to find out where the whitelist is located. A couple of headscratches later I found that this is the file you need to deal with:

/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions/kfncbcioneejfnnelcdmocdjncbmceea /1.1/kill_flash.js

I’m not sure whether or not that crazy string is the same for everyone or generated randomly for each installation. If you see the kill_flash.js you’re there.

Opening this file reveals, at the very top the following variable.

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var whitelist = ["www.youtube.com","mail.google.com","gmail.com"];

What you need to do is simply append the domains you want to whitelist to this array, in quotes and separated by commas. Like so:

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var whitelist = ["www.youtube.com","mail.google.com","gmail.com", "ctrloptcmd.com"];

When you’ve done this you might want to create an alias for easy access to the file. Personally I just dragged it to my Dock for the sake of convenience.

I might at some point write an AppleScript or something to make this easier. If that ever happens I’ll be sure to post it here.

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The Hit List Forever

22/01/2010

Let me get the cheesy redundant joke done right off the bat:

On top of my list of things to get done is to finish Dave Allens Getting Things Done.

How droll. What fun.1

On top of the personal hit list of Andy Kim of The Potion Factory I’m willing to bet a few shillings you’ll find “Finish The Hit List Touch”, the fabled iPhone companion app to The Hit List Mac. I’m not sure that’s sound prioritizing though. I think perhaps he should bump up “Reconsider customer communication strategies” to number 1.

If you’re unacquainted with the app, its history and the state of things today, let me offer a brief summary.

Read the rest of this article »

  1. And in my case actually the plain truth. I’m still halfway through after trying both dead tree and audiobook. For now I’m settling for getting something done. ↩
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A few random AppleScript snippets

14/01/2010

I was just writing an AppleScript to look up words on the excellent NinjaWords and decided to post it in case someone else needs something similar. Since one snippet of AppleScript is not a very meaty post, I’ll throw in a couple extra.

Look up word on NinjaWords

Select a word and copy it to the clipboard. Then invoke this script via Quicksilver or LaunchBar or whatever is your favorite tool for invocations.

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set clip_url to (the clipboard as string)
set lc_url to do shell script "echo " & clip_url & " | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'"
set ninjaURL to "http://ninjawords.com/" & lc_url
do shell script "open " & ninjaURL

Wrap link in ‘a href…’

Note: This one will look slightly different depending on whether you are using Quicksilver, LaunchBar, whatever. The key is that you pass a string value into the script and it returns one back to you. This example is for LaunchBar.
Copy a link to the clipboard, invoke the script, paste your now a-tagged link.

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on handle_string(vanillaStr)
  set quote to ASCII character 34
 
 
  set openTag to "<a href=" & quote
  set closeTag to quote & ">"
  set finishTag to "</a>"
 
  set TempTID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
  set AppleScript's text item delimiters to space & ":" & space
  if (count of text items of vanillaStr) is greater than 1 then
    set urlStr to text item 1 of vanillaStr
    set linkStr to text item 2 of vanillaStr
    set returnStr to openTag & urlStr & closeTag & linkStr & finishTag
  else if (count of text items of vanillaStr) is 1 then
    set urlStr to text item 1 of vanillaStr
    set linkStr to "linkage"
    set returnStr to openTag & urlStr & closeTag & linkStr & finishTag
  else
    beep
    return
  end if
  set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
  tell application "LaunchBar"
    perform action "Copy and Paste" with string returnStr
  end tell
end handle_string

New File

Sometimes you just want a dang text file to magically appear.

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try
  tell application "Finder" to set the this_folder ¬
    to (folder of the front window) as alias
on error -- no open folder windows
  set the this_folder to path to desktop folder as alias
end try
tell me to activate
set thefilename to text returned of (display dialog ¬
  "Create file named:" default answer "filename.txt")
set thefullpath to POSIX path of this_folder & thefilename
do shell script "touch \"" & thefullpath & "\""
do shell script "mate \"" & thefullpath & "\""

That’s it for now. I have some gems saved for a later post, but they wouldn’t make sense out of context so you’ll just have to wait.

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Things Migrator 2

14/12/2009

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

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Migrate from Things to The Hit List

14/05/2009

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

Things Migrator ScreenSo 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.

4 Comments