Automacic
Security Fence of the Day: in Saudi Arabia.
I’ve never had much use for AppleScript, but a couple of MacOSXHints today used it and one intrigued me: dumbing the clipboard down to plain text. With that script, if I’m reading something in a Really Big Purple Font in Safari and want to cut and paste it into iChat, I can turn it into plain black text and it will come out the normal size. There was also a clunky script to toggle image loading in Safari. Other scripts in the Apple Safari AppleScript collection are more appealing - window-resizing ones like the javascript bookmarklets I mentioned a few posts back, and my personal favorite, Combine Windows, a script that takes all your open Safari windows and merges them into one window with tabs. It’s very handy for sites that insist on opening links in new windows.
The AppleScript menu isn’t on by default, but this page makes it easy to set up. Some of the Safari scripts require that you turn on GUI scripting, which as far as I can tell just means checking the “Enable access for assistive devices” checkbox in the Universal Access system preference pane. You can download collections of AppleScripts for other scriptable programs from Apple.
While I’m geeking, I should mention some other Mac links I’ve come across lately:
- SideTrack, a trackpad driver that adds scrolling to your trackpad - I’m using just the vertical scrolling and I haven’t had a kernel panic yet
- A MacDevCenter article on doing backups without commercial backup software
- MacDevCenter on building your own browser with WebKit
- MacDevCenter on LaTeX for MacOS X
- HandBrake, DVD ripping software for the Mac - see also the latest DivX macosxhint
- Folding@home for the Mac