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Mail Headline 1.0.1

Eric Blair — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:12:14 +0000

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.

Mail Headline

Eric Blair — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:22:14 +0000

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!

Display Webpages in Tabs

Eric Blair — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 08:07:18 +0000

I was looking at my Projects page and realized I hadn’t added anything new for over 3 years. I also saw I had some year+ old code in my Sandbox folder that appeared ready for distribution.

In the spirit of those two things, I’m happy to actually post something new. My Display Webpages in Tabs Automator action is now available. This action is largely a drop-in replacement for Apple’s Display Webpages action. The main difference is that my action, appropraitely enough, generates new tabs for URLs instead of new windows. The other difference is that my action only returns a single document reference instead of one one reference for every created document.

You can download Display Webpages in Tabs directly or you can visit the Automator Actions page on this very site. I may get around to posting the other actions I’ve got floating around my system.