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Update (11/24/07): EagleFiler 1.2.6 now includes built-in support for capturing from MarsEdit that expands on this capture script. That capture script is located inside the EagleFiler application, in the Contents/Resources/Capture Scripts/ folder. More information is available here.

With MarsEdit 2.0’s release, I’ve decided to re-evaluate my post management scheme. Previously, I created my posts in BBEdit, then moved them over MarsEdit via an AppleScript. I did this because I wanted to have copies of my posts archived on my hard drive and not lost whenever I refreshed my weblog in MarsEdit. A downside to this approach is that I end up underusing MarsEdit’s Draft’s functionality — I’d either keep the BBEdit window open the whole time I was working on a post or I’d save the post to my Posting directory and have to remember finish editing it at a later date.

My app tool-chain has shifted a bit over the last 3 years, so I now have a few more options at my disposal. One of those is EagleFiler. My new workflow is to compose and post in MarsEdit, then move the completed post of to Eagle Filer. To facilitate this, I’ve written an EagleFiler capture script for MarsEdit — to archive my post, I simply need to hit F1.

The script’s a bit long to include here, so I’m just going to post it for download.

Download MarsEdit Capture Script

To use this script, save it to ~/Library/Application Support/EagleFiler/Capture Scripts/, creating the last folder if necessary.

There are a few notes about what information is available for capture. First, you can’t capture a draft from the main MarsEdit window, only from the individual post window. Second, drafts which you have saved locally will have a value for date published. I believe this is the date the draft was first saved. Third, posts captured from the post window will not have a permalink value. Hopefully, future updates to MarsEdit will allow me to rectify at least a few of these.

There’s certainly room for some individualization in this script. Though I’ve stripped out the modification for public usage, my personal copy of this script adds some custom tags to each posting and sets BBEdit as the file creator. Another modification I’ve seen is adding the category information to the text of the posting. Additionally, you could add support for creating EagleFiler tags out of post keywords in addition/in place of post categories. Since Wordpress doesn’t support keywords, I didn’t implement this.

If you do edit the capture script after installing it, you’ll need to restart EagleFiler so the application will see the changes.

I wrote and tested this script for use with Wordpress blog. As far as other blogging packages are concerned, the script appears not to fail, though I can’t guarantee it’ll actually work.

As part of today’s exercise in time-killing, I visited the Apple Store to and checked out the new offerings and get my first close-up look at the iPhone. While I was taking a look at the various toys, I heard several people ask about the availability of the 4GB iPhone.

Guess that clearance pricing makes the low-end model even more popular.

Chris Turner:

anyone else starting to feel like there are too many versions of the
iPod?

I was slightly disappointed to see that there are now 4 entries in the iPod family. With the iPod touch, your iPod-buying decision is no longer simply a question of size/storage trade-off. Without a doubt, the iPod touch is a very interesting piece of hardware, but from an iPod standpoint, it has the same shortfall as an iPhone — limited storage. I’ve always been an iPod classic kind of guy because I wanted the hard drive space. I also enjoyed having access to all of the iPod features that the nano and mini lacked (thought the refurbished Nano’s have been tempting, if only to use with a Nike+). Now, among the screened iPods, the Classic appears to offer the the most storage space while offering fewest features. You obviously miss out on all the Touch’es iPhone-esque features while also missing the Nano’s Nike+ support (you do gain Search functionality, though, which I forgot about until visiting the new iPod classic’s features page).

Looking at the new offerings, I get the feeling that the iPod classic is not a long term product. Much like the Mac Classic marked the beginning of the end for the original Mac styling, I suspect the iPod classic represents the beginning of the end for the original iPod design. I think it’s just a matter of Apple not wanting to cede the high-capacity market while not compromising on the design of the Touch.

In addition to paying homage to a piece of Apple history, the iPod classic name rolls off the tongue better than the originally proposed name — iPod discontinued when flash prices drop.

I didn’t read anything one way or another, but it looks like the changes to the iPod OS are more than just cosmetic — according to the iPod Games section of the iTunes Store, games need to be updated to work with the iPod nano (video) and the iPod classic. Right now, Tetris, Ms. Pac-Man, and Sudoku are in-line for updates. Does this mean that the new models have made the jump to OS X? If it were simply a matter of updating the games to recognize the new iPods, I’d imagine all the games would be updated.

(Klondike, Vortex, and iQuiz have already been upgraded and come bundled with the Nano and Classic).

Follow-up thought — will Apple offer updates to anybody who already bought these games?

Mari Silbey:

Engadget is already calling the Starbucks feature weak, but I think I
disagree. (How’s that for a strong statement?) Impulse music buying is
still largely untapped. Sure you can bookmark songs with some services
in order to buy them later, but we haven’t really seen an effective
on-the-go version of this feature before.

I agree with Silbey’s assessment that the Starbucks features isn’t weak. Although I’m not the lounge-in-a-Starbucks type, plenty of people are. Starbucks has clearly found that it can make money by selling music, both in-store and via iTunes. I have to assume that Apple has found the existing iTunes-Starbucks partnership rewarding. The infrastructure costs for supporting the new integration can’t be that high. Given the number of people you already see in Starbucks with laptops and the number of iPhones and iPod touches you can expect to see, I think it’s reasonable to expect both sides to profit from this expansion to the Apple-Starbucks relationship.

I’ve posted Mail Headline 1.0.1. It’s a fairly small upgrade, but if you’ve had any trouble mailing articles, you should grab this version.

If anybody has trouble with this version, let me know.

What’s New:

• Mail Headline should no longer refuse to convert HTML that contains non-ASCII Unicode characters.
• No longer prepend “Fwd: ” to email subject.
• Links are included after the respective paragraphs instead of the end of the article.

As always, you can download Mail Headline directly or get more information from my AppleScript page.

I’ve been a pretty heavy user of NetNewsWire for several years now and enjoy seeing what new features Brent Simmons adds with each new release. At some point (version 2.0, maybe?), he added the ability to email post contents. Unfortunately, this only worked with Mail. Since I primarily use Mailsmith, you might see how this could be a problem. Therefore, AppleScript to the rescue.

Mail Headline is a plain-text replacement for the Mail Contents of this News Item command that’s capable of supporting multiple email clients. The contents of the news item are processed with Aaron Swartz’ html2text and converted to Markdown-formatted text. The currently supported email clients include Mailsmith, Entourage, and Mail (if you prefer plain text over rich text for emails).

There are a few things you should know about this script.

• You need to configure it for you email client before it will run. You do this by opening the script and uncommenting the line indicating your email client.
• As written, it requires NetNewsWire 2.1.
• NetNewsWire will not run the script from its Script menu. I recommend using something like the system script menu or FastScripts
• html2text sometimes has refuses to translate pages. The two reasons I’ve seen for this are unencoded or unknown HTML entities. html2text can be updated to recognize the latter; I’m not sure what to do about the former.

You can visit the AppleScripts page for more information and to download the latest version

Update: Turns out Mail Headline supports 2.1, as well. Thanks for the info, Brent!

Chuq Van Rospach:

The more I think about it, the more I realize we have a great
real-world example that for all we talk about long tails and courting
the early adopters and the geek elite as a way to generate buzz and
figure out what the Next Big Thing is, we also need to be careful
about trusting the geeks TOO much, especially with consumer products.

Chuq’s post struck me as the flip side to my thoughts on MBAs and technology. Just like you can’t let the MBAs run amok designing products by feature checklists, you can’t let the geeks go crazy, either. To develop quality solutions, you need to focus on the user. This is something that both parties need to remember.

When iTunes Plus first debuted, I noticed a few tracks I’d purchased hadn’t shown up as eligible for an upgrade, even though I could find the same tracks in the iTunes Plus section of the store. At the time, I chalked the discrepancies up to the newness of iTunes Plus — I figured it was taking time for all the upgrades to be cataloged and that I’d eventually see the upgrades become available. After a while, I simply forgot about the songs.

I was poking around the iTunes Store the other day and I stumbled across one of the tracks that should’ve been upgradable. Figuring that this wasn’t simply a processing issue, I decided to write iTunes Store Support and find out what was happening.

(more…)

A little over two years ago, TiVo quietly enabled the ability to stream unprotected AAC to TiVos for use via the Home Media Option. I say quietly, because this feature required you to install lame and didn’t appear to be documented anywhere. At the time, I viewed this as a promising sign that TiVo was starting to make good on it’s then 2-year-old statement that they were looking to add AAC support to the HMO. However, it’s been another 2+ years since that time and not much has changed.

What has changed is that Apple unveiled iTunes+, complete with unprotected AAC files. In theory, these files should “just work” with TiVo’s existing AAC support. Of course, as is true of many things, the transition from theory to reality did not go as planned. As reported by The Apple Blog, iTunes+ still are not playable through HMO.

We come here not to bury TiVo, but to fix it.

(more…)

Bandwagon, a service providing online backup of the music in your iTunes, is going live on February 22nd.

To help promote their launch, Bandwagon is offering free one-year accounts to anybody who blogs the upcoming release. What can I say, I’m a cheap date

Seriously, though, as somebody who’s shot out of bed thinking he’d lost all his iTunes purchases, this does sound useful.

Desktop Curtain, by Peter Maurer, covers your desktop with an images, giving you a clean background for taking screenshots. I would’ve found something like this useful, oh, yesterday, when I was shifting around icons trying to get a clean background capturing a window.

I know, not the most momentous of posts after a 2+ month layoff, but I was amused at the timing of learning about this app.

[via Daring Fireball]