Hawk Wings » bookmarks

Applescript to back up iCal and other apps

Tim Gaden — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 09:54:43 +0000

A poster on macOSXHints provides an applescipt which will backup the data files from iCal, Address Book and Delicious Library as well as bookmarks from Camino and del.icio.us.

It’s useful as it is, especially if you use those apps, but the poster also hopes that readers will “glean parts that are relevant to your system/apps or adapt the whole thing or even add to it”.

If you are a beginner at AppleScript (like me) you will be interested to see the section for the del.icio.us bookmarks, which shows how AppleScript can tab through the fields of a web page.

The poster wrote this script after “a few frustrating losses of data”. A warning to us all.ical, address book, camino, applescript, backup, de.lico.us, bookmarksSimilar Posts:

WebnoteHappy 1.2 gets del.icio.us support and more

Tim Gaden — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 13:24:09 +0000

WebnoteHappy has been updated. This clever app with an unfortunate name is a bookmark manager that allows you to tag and annotate your links.

The new version (1.2) brings support for syncing your bookmarks with your del.icio.us account, adds hot key support for Firefox and Shiira, clickable hyperlinks in the notes field and more.

All the fields in a WebnoteHappy webnote are now editable, including the URL itself.

The app sells itself partly as a native Mac OS X interface for del.icio.us and it does look nice:

You can read the full list of changes in the release notes .

WebnoteHappy is shareware (USD 24.95) and is available from the developer’s web site.bookmarks, delicious, URLs, tagging, Web 2.0, firefox, internet, not apple mailSimilar Posts:

Pukka 1.3: del.icio.us posting client gets even better

Tim Gaden — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 12:08:26 +0000

Pukka is a posting client for del.icio.us that can be activated quickly by a bookmarklet on your browser toolbar.

It automatically loads the URL and title of the active web page into its interface. All you have to do is tag it, type a description if you want and post it. Highlighted text on the page is added to the description field. Very quick. Very smart.

And it has just got smarter. Version 1.3 released over the weekend adds support for private bookmarking through a new option in the app’s preferences pane:

Holding down the option key when posting now prevents the app from resetting.

The new version also adds full AppleScript support.

See it in action in a screencast. Pukka is shareware (USD 5) and available from codesorcery’s web site .delicious, URL, bookmarks, posting, bookmarklet, applescript, private posting, web 2.0, socialSimilar Posts:

Cloud.lic.io.us: a delic.io.us widget

Tim Gaden — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 12:30:31 +0000

Cloud.lic.io.us is a widget that helps you quickly access your delic.io.us tags and bookmarks.

A new version was released today, which adds a “fancy slider” to the widget and a fix for changes in the delic.io.us API.

The widget offers a number of options to control the display of your tags.

You can choose — as you can in delic.io.us itself — to view only tags with one, two or five matches and more:

Clicking one of the tags opens a slider drawer which displays the matching URLs. You can click on them to open them directly or jump to the display of the URLs in delic.io.us itself by clicking the arrow on the bottom of the drawer:

Cloud.lic.io.us looks like it is freeware and the latest patched version is available from the developer’s web site .delicious, widget, productivity, tags, bookmarks, not apple mailSimilar Posts:

WebNoteHappy 1.1 now plays nicely with Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 12:26:07 +0000

Don’t let the name put you off. WebNoteHappy is a nice app for collecting, organising, tagging and sharing your bookmarks.

Smart folders, tags, integration with del.icio.us, global hotkeys and bookmarklets give the app substantial grunt.

It is also browser-independent, which is a boon for people who like or have to switch between browsers.

For Mail.app fans the initial version presented a problem. Its global hotkey (Command-Shift-D) conflicted with Mail’s inbuilt Send Message shortcut.

That has now been fixed; the hotkey is now only enabled for Camino, Firefox, NetNewsWire, OmniWeb, and Safari.

Other improvements, including private saving of bookmarks to del.icio.us, and fixes are detailed in the release notes .

WebNoteHappy is shareware (USD 24.95) and a 30 day demo is available from the developer’s web site .bookmarks, tagging, organizing, delicious, multi broswer, mail.app, apple mail, productivity
Similar Posts:

Quicksilver and Yojimbo 1.2

Tim Gaden — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 12:47:48 +0000

In a post on the recently announced update to Yojimbo, I suggested that Fraser Speirs’ AppleScript offered a faster way to get things into Yojimbo than the new browser bookmarklets.

Since then I have learned that Quicksilver now has a Yojimbo plugin, that adds five new actions to the vast range of Quicksilver options.

Using the main interface, it is easy to add bookmarks, import text or create a web archive:

But there is an even easier way. You can set a hotkey trigger in Quicksilver for the bookmarklets themselves, choosing “Run Javascript” as the action. Assign the keystroke you want to them, and—hey presto!—you have single keystroke bookmarking and archiving:

[Thanks to Anthony and Jade who made me think more about this.]yojimbo, quicksilver, bookmarks, web archives, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, not apple mailSimilar Posts:

toread: Email yourself web pages

Tim Gaden — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 12:39:58 +0000

toread is a web service that allows you to “bookmark” or email yourself web pages with the single click of browser bookmarklet.

Of course, Safari users can do this manually by pressing Command-I, which sends the contents of a web page to a new Mail.app message, filling in their own email address and then sending the email.

This is much quicker and cleaner.

After registration, you are offered a bookmarklet to drag and drop into the Bookmarks Bar of your browser (I use Safari):

One click on this bookmarklet and the page you are looking at is emailed to your inbox:

There’s nothing else to do.

This may appeal especially to people who use Mail.app as an Information mananger, allowing for the quick and painless archiving of web pages.

The privacy policy of the service, which is run by the Japanese RSS management company Sidefeed looks OK to me:

About disclosing your personal information

We will not sell, rent or lease your personal information to any other third party.
We will disclose your personal information to outside third parties only when one or any of the following conditions are met.

When we have your consent to share the information.
To process and fulfill your order or notify you of order status.
When it’s necessary for us to observe the law.
When it’s necessary to protect and defend your rights or property.
When it’s based on the statistical purposes without any information that could be used to link that information to you.
We reserve the right to disclose any and all pertinent customer information to law enforcement or other government officials as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate.

It is a clearly a Web 2.0 service, as it is in beta.email, bookmarks, bookmarklets, browser, archiving, web pagesSimilar Posts:

Yojimbo: Bare Bones’ new information manager

Tim Gaden — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 13:26:33 +0000

I’ve been a happy user of StickyBrain , an information manager, as long as I have used a Mac.

When Bare Bones Software launched their new information manager, Yojimbo, last week I decided to give it a go.

I’ve been using it a lot and I like it.

If you are interested in information managers and organising yourself (“productivity”), you can read the full review after the jump.

Looks the business

The first and most surprising thing about Yojimbo is how good it looks. Bare Bones’ flagship products, BBEdit and MailSmith , are not known for their eye-candy.

They have serious, no-nonsense, almost pre-Mac OS X interfaces like this:

Yojimbo, however, is very handsome indeed.

It has a very polished interface that offers yet more evidence of the rise and rise of the Mail.app-like look:

The “Mailbox Drawer” on the left contains pre-made folders and any custom folders you have created. You can give your folders any image that QuickTime understands.

Does the business

Not only does it look good, it has organization muscle too.

Yojimbo can save and manage links to web pages and other online resources, short texts or notes, clips, quotations, instructions, song lyrics like any other information manager.

It also has some neat features that help it stand out from the pack. It can keep your login and password information for web sites and servers, encrypting them for added security. It also stores serial numbers and can save snapshots of entire web pages as Web Archives.

In another clever trick, an option is added to the PDF services menu in your Mac’s Print panel, allowing you print a receipt for an online purchase directly into Yojimbo, where you can store and encrypt it.

Four features in particular have impressed me:

Smart folders: The pre-set folders, called “Smart Collections”, display all your flagged item, the 20 most recently added items, all your web archives and PDFs, passwords, bookmarks and serial numbers, regardless of which custom collection you have stored them in. Another smart folder shows you all the items that are not yet in any custom collection.

It would be even nicer if you could make your own smart collections, but this is still a very useful feature for finding stuff fast.

UPDATE: Founder and CEO of Bare Bones, Rich Siegel, confirms in the comments below that the ability to create your own smart collections is something Bare Bones is working on. Excellent!

Quick Input Panel: Yojimbo lacks the StickyBrain’s Contextual Menu options for clipping without leaving the app you are in. But Yojimbo adds a Quick Input Panel to do the same job. Copy something to the clipboard, then hit a hotkey to bring up the Input Panel:

It is quite clever at auto-inserting the clipboard contents into the relevant field for each kind of note you can create on the fly.

You can also use this (as here) to create a new note, storing a thought for later without interrupting what you are doing at the time.

The Drop Dock: Yojimbo has another way of adding new items. The Drop Dock adds a Drop Drawers-like tab to the edge of your desktop. Selecting something with your mouse and then dragging it over the tab, opens the drawer. You then have the option of dropping the item directly into your Library or a custom collection:

.Mac Syncing: StickBrain uses .Mac to make a backup which you can them restore to the same computer or download to another.

Yojimbo takes .Mac use to a higher level. Using Tiger’s sync engine, it allows you to add all your settings and items to the list of things that are automatically synced between your Macs:

A set-and-forget, always synchronised database of the information you need, whatever computer you are sitting at. Sweet.

Is the business

StickyBrain has been around for longer and has a richer feature-set. Some of those things I will miss (until Bare Bones adds them) — the ability to email a note, linking different items together and linking items with Address Book contacts.

These days no app seems quite complete without a QuickSilver plugin, so I’m looking forward to that too. (Although see the tip posted in the comments below).

But I am impressed enough with Yojimbo to switch. In addition to the things mentioned above, Yojimbo feels faster and seems to suck less energy from my system.

Like all of Bare Bones products, the attention to detail is amazing. The help documentation is beautifully laid out and illustrated. Little things like that speak volumes.

It can only get even better. Bare Bones got my money (USD 39).

Links:
Yojimbo at Bare Bones

What some other bloggers are thinking
StickyBrain and Yojimbo compared
Out goes StickyBrain, in comes Yojimbo
Yojimbo Review address book, bare bones, bookmarks, contextual menu, information manager, mail.app, organization, passwords, pdf, productivity, quicksilver, smart folders, stickybrain, sync engine, yojimboSimilar Posts:

MySync: .Mac syncing without .Mac

Tim Gaden — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 13:34:51 +0000

I like the look of this.

MySync is an app that provides all the benefits of .Mac synchronisation without the need to have a .Mac account.

It allows you to sync your Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts, Mail Accounts, Rules, Signatures, and Smart Mailboxes between Macs connected on a single local area network.

It uses the Apple Sync engine built-in to Tiger (so requires 10.4+) and configures one computer as the master and the rest as slaves.

The main window shows how it works:

Be default it will only sync with other computers on the network running under the same short user name, although there is an option to “masquerade” as another user if required.

Of course, MySync’s features do not replace all the benefits of a .Mac account. MySync’s developer provides a comparison of the two on its web site:
.

I can read this. If you can’t, a larger table can be found on the developer’s web site.

MySync is currently in public beta, offering time-limited licences for the beta trial.

You can download the beta from the developer’s web site.Similar Posts:

Hallon: Bookmarks for Mail.app and Address Book

Tim Gaden — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 20:27:28 +0000

Hallon is an open source utility that extends the idea of bookmarks from web browsers to apps like Apple Mail, Address Book and iTunes.

It adds a raspberry icon to your Statusbar, which controls a drop-down menu storing all the bookmarks you create. Bookmarks can be edited and note or alarms added to them:

It currently supports Apple Mail, Address Book, iTunes, iPhoto, Terminal, Finder and Safari. Additional plugins for Entourage, iPhoto 5 and Firefox have already been added with the promise of more on the way.

You can read more about it and download it from Hallon’s Sourceforge page.

[Via TUAW]Similar Posts: