Cocoalicious to Yojimbo synchronization script January 14, 2007
Posted by James Webster in : apple , 1 comment so farUpdate: Looks like there were a couple of bugs with the last version. Jim Correia of Bare Bones also pointed out a way to avoid the timeout issue. Download the new version.
Fans of Bare Bones Software’s information organisation application Yojimbo and Yahoo’s del.icio.us might find the following useful. With the latest 1.4 update Yojimbo is extensively AppleScriptable. There have been a few calls on the user mailing list for an easy way to import a user’s del.icio.us bookmarks into Yojimbo as web archives. Using Sci-Fi Hi-Fi’s excellent Cocoalicious and Growl I have come up with Cocoalicious To Yojimbo. Assuming you have set up Cocoalicious with your del.icio.us login credentials (be aware if you are downloading Cocoalicious for the first time that you will need to read this weblog post to deal with the change in del.icio.us’ API URL), my Cocoalicious To Yojimbo AppleScript will do the following:
- Create a collection in Yojimbo called ‘del.icio.us’, if one does not exist already.
- Create a web archive in the del.icio.us collection for each bookmark in your del.icio.us account. The title of the del.icio.us bookmark is used to set the name of the web archive so subsequent runs of the script should not result in duplicated web archives.
- The notes (aka extended) field of the del.icio.us bookmark will be copied to the Yojimbo web archive’s comment field. The tags of the bookmark will also be applied to the Yojimbo web archive (thanks to Doug’s AppleScript’s for iTune’s text_to_list function).
- Once all the del.icio.us bookmarks have been either skipped or downloaded, the script will check to see if there are any web archive in Yojimbo’s del.icio.us collection that no longer exist in your del.icio.us bookmarks and will move the archive to the trash if so.
- Growl updates are provided throughout the process (it is mandatory so please make sure it is installed).
There is one caveat with usage; Yojimbo’s current behaviour when creating a web archive is to set the name of the item to the name of the web page once the page has been completely downloaded. The script currently waits up to 30 seconds for the name of the new web archive item to change from ‘untitled’ to something else, it then sets the web archive name to the title of the del.icio.us bookmark (ie. in order to match the web archive against the corresponding bookmark; potential URL redirection make using the URL unreliable). This is necessary as the title of the bookmark is not necessarily the same as the web page or it may change. However if the page takes longer than 30 seconds to download the script will set the name regardless, only to have Yojimbo change it again when the download completes. It would be great if Bare Bones could provide a way to switch off this behaviour. Thanks to Jim Correia I have managed to avoid this issue in the latest version.
Download Cocoalicious To Yojimbo, the archive contains both an application bundle and the script code itself. I think this script is reasonably well debugged. Please leave any issues or suggestions in the comments!
iPhone and iTV opinions January 10, 2007
Posted by James Webster in : apple , 2 commentsLet me join the chorus of amateur punditry that has flooded the Internet post-Stevenote…
- iPhone: it certainly looks neat but I am not sure whether it will displace the current phone I am waiting for, the Nokia N95. It is a little uncertain what the extensibility model is at the moment beyond Widgets. The tech specs make no mention of Java MIDP which would be a disappointing omission however it is apparently running a slimmed-down version of OS X, so it may be eventually possible. Apple is quite keen on keeping the user experience of their consumer devices locked within carefully defined parameters however, so it might not officially happen if they don’t want it to. I also wonder which Australian carrier might be Apple’s partner Down Under, I doubt it will be Telstra since they have been closely aligned with Microsoft in the past. Vodafone also seems to be unlikely given they have a presence in the US (Verizon Wireless) and Apple chose to partner with Cingular. Perhaps it will be Optus? Ultimately I hope the iPhone evolves to being carrier-agnostic.
- AppleTV: this might be the device that defines the ‘digital media in your living room’ genre for two reasons according to my reading of the tech specs; 1. it supports MPEG-4 in addition to H.264 so everyone’s BitTorrented video should just work, 2. it supports Windows XP so it won’t be necessary to buy a Windows Media Center edition of XP or Vista to work with your XBox 360 (which also requires your video to be encoded as WMV, unless you use the Transcode 360 product which requires a degree of fiddling. Disappointingly it does not appear at the moment to have an extensibility mechanism, it would be great if it supported Dashboard Widgets since they are going to be present on your Mac Dashboard AND now your iPhone. And where is the YouTube integration that surely Apple board member and ‘GooTube’ CEO Eric Schmidt must have considered?
My outrageous Macworld prediction… January 4, 2007
Posted by James Webster in : apple , 1 comment so far‘Tis the week before Macworld and the Apple blogosphere is running rife with speculation and wild conjecture at what His Steveness will announce.
Since I successfully called the integration of iPod with in-flight entertainment systems here is my wild prognostication for One More Thing…
The iBook brand will be repurposed for the launch of an e-ink ebook reader, which will finally do for ebooks what the iPod did for MP3s.
Remember that you heard it here first!