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Sunday Nerd Out: Apple Scripts in Quicksilver

February 7, 2010 in Productivity, tech by George | No comments

Well, it’s not been a good day; my less-than-six-month-old PowerBook appears to have eaten its hard drive.

The good news is that between moving everything up to Google Docs/Gmail/Google Calendar and doing hourly Time Machine back ups very little has been lost (though, I hadn’t done a Time Machine back up since Friday night). Knock Wood.

I’m using Marci’s MacBook until my appointment tomorrow with the ill-advisedly named “Geniuses” at the Apple Store. This requires me to get her machine to operate the way I like my machine to operate, which essentially means installing Quicksilver and getting my Triggers going.

Perhaps in a feeble attempt to overcome feeling helpless about my hard drive dying I decided to solve a problem I’ve had with Quicksilver that’s been bugging me for some time: my inability to figure out how to hide apps using a trigger.

Opening an app with a trigger is as easy as can be:

1. Pull up QS
2. hit command “;” to get to the preferences
3. go to Triggers
4. hit the “+” key
5. access the app you want to open in the top panel
6. tab to the second, “Action,” panel and (if it doesn’t already display it) hit “O” to coax the “Open” command to appear in the Action panel
7. Hit Save and then click on the Trigger section and put whatever keystroke you want as the trigger (if, like I do, you want to use the Function keys (F1, etc.), you’ll need go to the “Keyboard and Mouse” System Preference panel and check the box that says, “Use all F1, F2 keys as standard function keys”)

You can now use the function keys to pull up pretty much whatever you want; for me F1 pulls up Safari, F2: Firefox, F3: Tweetie, etc.

The problem I wanted to solve is that I’d like to be able to quickly hit a modified function key to hide these apps. For instance, I wanted to be able to hit [Command F1] to hide Safari after I’d used “F1″ to pull it up.

You’d think that’d be easy, and there may be an easier way than what I’ve come up with, but a little apple scripting goes a long way here.

To hide any app do the following:

1. Pull up QS as described above in steps 1 thru 4
2. Now in the top panel (“Select an item”) of QS type a period: “.” – this tells QS that you want to enter text
3. Use the following script and substitute whatever app you want to hide for where I have “Safari”:

tell application “System Events” to tell process “Safari” to set visible to false

4. You’ll note that as soon as QS realizes you’re putting a script into its first panel (via the words “tell application”) the second (“Action”) panel changes to “Run as AppleScript
5. Hit Save
6. As above, in Step 7, click on the keystroke area and enter in whatever key or key combination you want to use to, in this case, hide “Safari.” As I’ve said, I use a modifier of the key I use to open, so F1 opens safari and [command + F1] hides it

This may seem like a lot of trouble, but I promise you, those actions of moving your hands from your keyboard to your mouse and back again add up.

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Quicksilver gets Google-ized

January 14, 2009 in tech by George | 1 comment

It’s no secret that my all-time favorite app is Quicksilver. Try as I might, however, I just can’t convert that many people to see the light of its genius.

Happily, Google is now assisting me in my evangelical efforts. They’ve recently introduced Google Search Box
.

Wisely, Google Search Box (GSB) is a dumbed-down version of Quicksilver; it’s dead simple to try (unlike QS). Basically, after downloading the app, you hit the command key twice and a search box pops up. Type in what you want and you’re off to the races. Many people, I’m sure, will simply use it as a short cut to search Google without having to pull up a browser window, etc.

There’s more to it than just Google search, however. For instance, try typing in a name of someone in your address book. You’ll see a drop down of all the people with this name, and their contact information.

You can customize precisely what will be searched via the preferences.

While QS allows for pretty much infinite customization, for those who don’t want to bother with the complexities of QS, GSB will prove a nice alternative.

I do, however, expect that GSB will continue to evolve and, more and more, resemble QS. Why, you ask. Well, because the great Alcor, the developer of QS, just happens to also work for Google, and is the developer of GSB. Good times.

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Wed. Morning Geek Out: Bring all items to your main monitor

October 22, 2008 in tech by George | No comments

I’m constantly connecting and disconnecting my laptop to and from my external monitors. The downside of this is that, with some regularity, when I unhook from my external monitors the items that were open on these monitors are not visible on my laptop screen (apparently the computer still thinks the externals are hooked up…OK Computer?). So, I can’t grab these items even though I can see them when I show all items using Expose. Even restarting the app doesn’t help.

Well, happily, there’s a script that remedies the problem. Cut and paste the script into Script Editor, and save it as whatever you want (I called the script “Center Items on Monitor”). I put it in my applications folder so that I can invoke it using Quicksilver.

Here’s the script:

– Example list of processes to ignore: {“xGestures”} or {“xGestures”, “OtherApp”, …}
property processesToIgnore : {}

– Get the size of the Display(s), only useful if there is one display
– otherwise it will grab the total size of both displays
tell application “Finder”
set _b to bounds of window of desktop
set screen_width to item 3 of _b
set screen_height to item 4 of _b
end tell

tell application “System Events”
set allProcesses to application processes
set _results to “”
repeat with i from 1 to count allProcesses
set doIt to 1
repeat with z from 1 to count processesToIgnore
if process i = process (item z of processesToIgnore) then
set doIt to 0
end if
end repeat

if doIt = 1 then
tell process i
repeat with x from 1 to (count windows)
set winPos to position of window x
set _x to item 1 of winPos
set _y to item 2 of winPos

if (_x < 0 or _y < 0 or _x > screen_width or _y > screen_height) then

set position of window x to {0, 22}

end if
end repeat

end tell
end if
end repeat
end tell

One note, you need to check the box for “Enable Access for Assistive Devices” in the Universal Access preference pain.

Have at it.

[via Macosxhints]

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Quicksilver script for Twitter

February 15, 2008 in tech by George | 2 comments

twitter

The jury is still out here at 9GS HQ with re Twitter. I’m trying it, and there’s something compelling about it, but – eh – just not sure.

If, however, your convinced that up to the minute updating of your activity is imperative, this very nice script makes it super easy to update your Twitter feed.

You’ll need the free Twitter client, Twitterific.

Once you have it loaded up, just paste this script into your script editor:

using terms from application “Quicksilver”
on process text tweet
tell application “Keychain Scripting”
set twitter_key to first Internet key of current keychain whose server is “twitter.com”
set twitter_login to quoted form of (account of twitter_key & “:” & password of twitter_key)
end tell
set twitter_status to quoted form of (“status=” & tweet)
set results to do shell script “curl –user ” & twitter_login & ” –data-binary ” & twitter_status & ” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json”
— display dialog results
return nothing
end process text
end using terms from

…and put it here: ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions as Tweet.scpt.

Now, invoke QS, hit the “.” to enter text, type your update, and tab to “tweet” to post right to Twitter.

It’s all nicely described here.

Certainly makes it even easier to get the minutiae of one’s life out there.

I do think that for artists Twitter has some purpose. You could, for instance, use it as yet another way to keep your fans clued in to what you’re doing. Why, on the other hand, anyone would want to know what I’m doing on a minute by minute basis…who knows.

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Productivity Apps ’08

February 10, 2008 in Productivity by George | 1 comment

New(ish) year. Seems like a good time to discuss the apps that are making my life more productive. Some familiar apps, and some new ones.

1. At the top of the pile, once again, is Quicksilver. Not a minute of computer use goes by where I don’t use this app. It’s so crucial to my computer use that it was the first thing I installed on my wife’s new MacBook. I simply can’t compute without it. While apparently Alcor will no longer be developing the app (he’s too busy at Google), I find it suits my need perfectly as is. Get it. It’s free.

2. 1Password has gone through a bunch of revs, and at this point hums along beautifully. Another app that I use constantly, and saves me a ton of time and worry. Keeps all my passwords as well as the urls for my ever-increasing on-line commerce sites. Well worth the $29.95.

3. Yojimbo is another app that has recently undergone some significant updates. It stores all the various articles, web pages, notes, ideas, and other folderol that floats through my transom on a daily basis in neat little folders. The addition of tags, security, and smart folders only adds to the value you get for $39.00

4. Yep is a little buggy (perhaps because I’m still using the free version), but I find it indispensable for scanning right into a tagged organizational system. (If I could scan right into Yojimbo, I’d likely abandon Yep). So much of my organizational jujitsu comes from the fact that I have a scanner on a shelf right under my desk. Some random piece of paper comes in…biff…bam…boom…it’s scanned, imported into Yep, and organized for future reference.

5. As I give presentations pretty much every work day, one of my favorite little free apps is Caffeine. It does one thing: keeps your screen from going to a screensaver or sleep mode. While I’m aware this can be accomplished via system preferences, I find Caffeine a heck of a lot easier. It’s free.

6. I was lucky enough to get an invite to the private beta version of Skitch, but now it’s in public beta, and everyone should get their hands on this fantastic image capture app. It’s so unbelievably well thought out (ability to resize, rename, mark up, email, FTP images, etc. – all within the interface) that it simply shames all the contenders.

more soon.

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