Good Firefox extension for GMail

Lifehacker has a post here showing how to use the extension they've compiled a bunch of good Greasemonkey extensions for making GMail even more easy to use into.

More keyboard macros, adds icons to messages with attachments, saving searches, a helper for making a new filter based on the message you're looking at, and more goodies.

Google Desktop for Mac

So I can finally talk about this. To sum up, very cool. You can use it for launching applications like Quicksilver, or just use it to search the docs on your machine like Spotlight, only with less frustration. And you can have it search your GMail account, too.

Fun with iPhoto

Nathaniel Grey has a great little plugin for iPhoto that lets you use your own scripts when you export photos here.

You can specify scripts that get run before the export, for each file in the export, and after the export. And they can be in real languages, not just AppleScript.

Use Google Calculator as OS X Service

Christopher Biagini packaged up an OS X service that wraps Google Calculator here.

Get subversion to launch on boot on OSX

There's a good article on how to get subversion server to start on boot on OS X here.

Serverskine

Free, and handy for the OS X based web developers.

Serverskine

"Designed to allow web developers, who deal with many projects at once, quick access to FTP, hosting accounts, domain name accounts and more. Especially when dealing with off-site shared hosting, keeping track of usernames and passwords can be daunting. Serverskine eliminates the terror by allowing you to quickly organize, search, edit, and backup all of your important account information."

MacFUSE 0.2.2

Another MacFUSE release, with bugfixes and sample filesystem source code. Get it here.

Replace AppleScript with Ruby

There's a great article on replacing AppleScript with Ruby at O'Reilly's MacDevcenter here.

Ugly hack to use AppleScript to present a dialog from a bash script, and get their choice.

I am reposting this from my old blog because a coworker ended up needing this. This has only been tested on 10.4, though nothing in it is all that special.

I was trying to slap a prettier interface onto a bash script for a client. I only bothered to use an AppleScript instead of just sending it to Growl because I needed them to be able to make a choice that I’m going to act on in my script. Even if it was just for display, I didn’t particularly want them to have to install Growl just for my little script.

This is ugly because I had to use a temporary file to store the AppleScript to display the dialog. It is also ugly because we can’t just display the dialog – we get an error message if we try – but we can tell another application to display the dialog. I picked System Events because it’s always running anyway.

This method also allows us to use a program-generated message instead of something static.

And just for the heck of it, I stuff the name of the button the user clicks into a variable, in case you want to use this snippet to display choices for the user.


#! /bin/bash

msg="Giant cracks appeared in the earth’s surface!"

# use $$ here so that the process ID of this script is part of the file name.
# this makes it a lot harder to accidentally step on another instance
# of the script that’s trying to also display something to the user.

tf=/tmp/ziggurat$$

# note that there should be 3 lines between EOF and EOF, in
# in case this is mangled by blogger

cat>$tf <<EOF
tell application "System Events"
display dialog "$msg" with icon stop buttons {"Foo", "Bar", "OK"} default button "OK"
end tell
EOF

foo=`osascript $tf | awk -F":" ’{print $2}’`

echo "foo: $foo"

# don’t forget to trash the temporary file when we’re done with it.
rm $tf


MacFUSE bumped to 0.21

New rev of MacFUSE available.