Posts tagged ‘mac’
Document uniformity with PDFpen, AppleScript, and Automator
April 4th, 2012 at 10:03 pm by Dr. Drang
I’m beginning to think I should have taking the advice of everyone in the Mac world and bought PDFpenPro long ago. It’s been the perfect solution for several problems since I got it. The most recent solution fixed a longstanding problem at work: getting a consistent “look” to company documents that are made by different…
Address Book and iCloud problems
April 3rd, 2012 at 10:45 pm by Dr. Drang
The Address Book is one of those programs Mac power users love to complain about. It’s continually compared with more powerful PIMs and found wanting. The Lion version was subjected to even more criticism, partially because it got the same “leather” treatment that iCal got, but mostly because its new “open book” look eliminated the…
More Address Book scripting
March 26th, 2012 at 11:59 pm by Dr. Drang
I’m still cleaning up my Address Book in preparation for a large mailing to my company’s clients. Today I wrote a couple of scripts, one in AppleScript and the other in Perl, to make address labels. I already had a script for printing address labels, but it’s meant for Avery 5164 labels, the big ones…
A couple of AppleScript topics
March 25th, 2012 at 7:05 pm by Dr. Drang
Do you mind if I make a suggestion? I think it’d be good for you to cut back on some of the Apple-centric sites you subscribe to or visit regularly. I mean, how many stories about the new iPad and Mike Daisey do you really need to read? Can’t most of them be summarized as…
Cleaning the Address Book with AppleScript
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:18 am by Dr. Drang
I’m weeding out my client address book, dropping contacts who have moved to other companies (unless I can find where they’ve gone) or retired, and fixing out-of-date and incomplete information. It’s a painful process, and one that, for the most part, doesn’t seem amenable to automation. I have been able to automate one part of…
Photo annotation setup script
March 18th, 2012 at 11:34 pm by Dr. Drang
I’ve been using OmniGraffle to annotate photos for years. I love the results, but there’s always been more fiddly setup than I’d like. I recently wrote a script to handle some of the fiddling. The kind of annotation I do regularly is similar to what I did in this photo from the update to my…
Improved Markdown table commands for TextMate
March 13th, 2012 at 10:31 pm by Dr. Drang
A few years ago, I made a small TextMate bundle with commands for manipulating MultiMarkdown-style tables1. One of the commands, Normalize Markdown Table, didn’t work too well if the table included non-ASCII characters. As I said in the post: I’m sure there’s some clever Python module I can use to get around this problem, but…
Fantastical and BusyCal
March 11th, 2012 at 12:29 am by Dr. Drang
Back in December, there was a discount bundle that included both Fantastical and BusyCal. I thought it odd to have two calendar programs in one bundle, but it was actually a stroke of genius marketing, because I bought the bundle specifically to test out both calendar applications as replacements for iCal. I won’t keep you…
Looking forward to scripting
March 8th, 2012 at 9:45 pm by Dr. Drang
I didn’t mean to ruin Clark’s evening with this tweet. I thought he knew that Hamish Sanderson had stopped developing appscript and was telling people to stop using it on new projects. @macdrifter Um, doesn’t Devon know that appscript has been end-of-lifed? appscript.sourceforge.net/status.html — Dr. Drang (@drdrang) Wed Mar 7 2012 (The tweet, by the way,…
Base64
March 4th, 2012 at 10:27 pm by Dr. Drang
The other day I asked a new coworker to send me his vCard. I had an entry in my Address Book for him, but I wanted to make sure I had all his contact info. As I imported it into Address Book, I noticed that the various parts of his name were screwed up, so…
