OmniFocus Mail Rule Now Works with Attachments

OmniFocus comes with a rule that can take a specially formatted email message and transform it into an action. I use this feature running on a Mac Mini to allow me to add actions to OmniFocus from my Windows PC at work.

One things that has always bothered me about it is that it doesn’t do anything with attachments. If you create one of these specially formatted messages and attach a file, you would expect that the attachment would be added to the newly minted action. It doesn’t. I’m sure there are good reasons for it. I can’t claim to know them but suffice it to say I want this functionality , dammit. So I did what any self-respecting geek would do: I rolled up my sleeves and started hacking.

In the end I managed to modify the mail rule that comes bundled with OmniFocus to attach all mail attachments to newly created actions. You can download the modified MailAction.applescript and try it out for yourself.

With this script installed, any mail messages that OmniFocus would normally pick up will also have their attachments added to the OmniFocus action that is created.

Installation

Installing this modified mail rule requires a little bit of hacking on your part.

1. Locate the OmniFocus.app bundle in your /Applications folder.
2. Right click on the OmniFocus.app bundle and select Show Package Contents
3. Navigate from the root of the bundle into Contents/Resources
4. Locate the file called MailAction.applescript and rename it to OldMailAction.applscript1
5. Copy the modified MailAction.applescript into the Contents/Resources folder.

If you already have the mail rule set up through OmniFocus the next time the rule gets run the new script will be used.

Thanks

I’d like to thank The OmniGroup for creating such an awesome product, for creating something that’s even remotely hackable, and lastly, for giving me permission to share this with you.

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1. The actual name doesn’t matter here. What’s important is that a backup copy of the file MailAction.applescript is created. In the event that something goes wrong you can just restore this file by renaming it and you’ll be back up and running. ↩

Byword Review

I’ve been a big fan of Byword for OS X for quite some time. I like how it strives to be simple but still allows you to make your own choices about a few things. When Byword came out for iOS a few weeks ago with iCloud support I thought it would be great. Below are some of the things I’ve found.

Occasional Crashes

In my limited use of Byword for iOS I’ve noticed a few crashes. Nowhere near an Instacast[1] level of crashy-ness, but crashes nonetheless. Crashes aren’t the end of the world, but for an app that feels[2] as simple as Byword it makes me wonder.

Limited Document Management

Overall I’ve found the document management options in Byword for iOS to be lacking. You get to chose up front whether you want to use iCloud or Dropbox syncing. But you can’t have it both ways and simply storing documents on the device is a no go. You can’t swap documents between iCloud and Dropbox on the fly.

On the positive side, conflict resolution is done quite elegantly. Instead of saving both copies to Dropbox and having you sort out the differences a little icon appears next to the file in the list. When you open the file you’re asked if you want to use the local or remote copy. It’s not perfect, and it’s certainly not magic. But it doesn’t leave a mess for the user to clean up, and it doesn’t force you to make a decision until you need to.

Cumbersome Interface

The developers behind Byword have spent a great deal of time stylizing the UI of the application. For the most part it looks really good, but I have a few issues with it. For starters, all of the buttons are custom to suit the color theme of the application. In what I believe is an attempt to make the UI chrome blend away the contrast has been turned way down making the buttons difficult to see and read. Don’t get me wrong, it looks great, but maybe the contrast could get turned up a bit for the next release.

Another issue I have is when attempting to use the application on the iPad with an external keyboard. Opening and selecting a document are pretty easy, but once a document has been selected and you begin editing all of the chrome disappears. There is no visually discernable way of getting to the document selector or showing the title bar to rename the document or preview what you’ve written.

As pointed out by Shawn Blanc in his review, the way around this is to swipe the document from left to right which will bring up the document selector. From there you can either select another document or tap on the title bar which will hide the document selector bringing the document back into focus, but with the title bar visible – until you tap on the text area that is.

Lastly, I tend to do a lot of writing either early in the morning or late at night. In both cases I find that editors with light color schemes to be distracting. Byword for the Mac has both a light and a dark color them which allows me to switch between as needed. The iOS version of Byword only has the light scheme.

Conclusion

Byword is definitely a 1.0 release. There’s certainly room for improvement, but the bones are solid. Despite the problems I’ve noted I keep coming back to Byword over both iA Writer and Writing Kit. In the case of the former I prefer the font selection under Byword even though iA Writer’s document management runs circles around Byword’s. In the case of the latter, I really like how Byword doesn’t spew conflict files all over Dropbox and leave a mess for me to clean up.

Going forward, I’m hoping to see improvements in the areas I’ve noted. Specifically I’d like to see the following issues addressed (in order of importance):

• Add a dark mode color theme.
• Fix the UI so that the app can be used efficiently with a bluetooth keyboard.
• Improve file management to the point where it’s at least on par with iA Writer.
• Reduce/eliminate crashes.[reduce-crashes-why]

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1. I don’t know if it’s just me, but Instacast crashes on me all the time when downloading new podcasts. It might have something to do with the crappy WiFi that I’m on during the days, or maybe its just an inherent problem with the app. Either way, it shouldn’t crash as much as it does.  ↩

2. In my mind one of the hallmarks of good design is making something really complicated feel really simple. Hiding complexity means that users don’t have to worry about things. But this only works as long as the abstraction doesn’t leak.  ↩

What Information Are You Sharing?

The Nest Learning Thermostat looks like a really cool device. I really like its overall design, and the technology behind it is pretty cool too. The amount of innovation in the less-than-sexy thermostat market has been pretty poor up until this point. Yes, yes. I really like the idea of the Nest. But there’s something that bothers me about it. Auto-Away.

The Nest has a feature called Auto-Away that automatically turns down the temperature in your house when it notices that no one is around. How does it do this you might ask?

Nest uses Nest Sense (an exclusive combination of sensors and algorithms) to notice when you’re away and when you come home.

Sounds pretty cool to me.

But consider too that the Nest also allows you to view the state of the thermostat and adjust its settings remotely via a website and mobile app. What would happen if their site was to be hacked? Or your phone stolen? Or your credentials compromised?

Someone without your knowledge would be able to tell if there’s anyone in the house right now. They’d also have access to your heating schedules which could be used to glean information about when you’re usually out of the house. As your house gets smarter, it needs to be extremely careful about to whom its giving details to.

If the information that Nest knows about your house was to fall into the hands of people with bad intent, they would know exactly when you’re not home. “When’s a good time to break into that house?” “I don’t know, check Nest.”

This problem isnt limited to just the Nest. Recently the power company has been installing Smart Meters – a new type of power meter that can wirelessly transmit information about power consumption. The data that it sends out includes how much power has been used, obviously, but also what times of day the power was used at, what sort of load, etc. These meters coupled with power line communications would enable your appliances to tell the power company that they’re in use, or allow the appliances to be shut off remotely.

I know I’m starting to sound like a crank, or one of those crazy people that march around outside of the power company’s offices. I don’t actually believe that we should stop progress because bad things could happen. The point I’m trying to make is that we, as a society, need to be diligent about what information we freely give out to others. So the question is: what information are you sharing?

Enough

I recently has the chance to read Patrick Rhone's latest book: Enough. I'm generally not much of a reader these days but I've been following Patrick and his message for quite some time now and when I opportunity came up to review his latest book I jumped at it. I wasn't disappointed.

Enough is very approachable. It's a short book of essays. You could easily get through the entire book in an afternoon, but you'd be missing the point. Enough isn't instructive. Enough isn't prescriptive. Enough is about slowing down and teaching you to be more mindful. Mindful about what you have. Mindful about what you use. Mindful about what you do.

Enough is best enjoyed slowly. It contains a vast amount of wisdom. But in order to unlock that wisdom, it needs to be consumed slowly. Each essay needs to be treated as its own. Savor each one for what it is. And reflect upon it to understand what it means, and how it applies to you.

After reading Enough I find myself trying to slow down; appreciating the things that I would have normally taken for granted. I find myself more critical of the things that attempt to enter my life. I find myself more mindful of how I spend my time, and what I spend my time on. I find myself feeling more in control.

Patrick has done an excellent job taking his message and distilling it into Enough. It's an excellent book. You won't find a book that's more dense with wisdom, thoughfulness, and mindfulness. I cannot recommend this book highly Enough.

ZAGGfolio Review

When I first saw keyboard docks for tablets I always thought it seemed like a stupid idea. The first one I saw was the iPad Keyboard Dock. It seemed pretty clumsy and riddled with design problems. It was oddly shaped making it hard to pack around; it only supported portrait mode; it was a wired dock making it only useful for the iPad; it was expensive at about $100.

The idea of using a physical keyboard always made a lot of sense to me. Using a physical keyboard was certainly more productive than using the on-screen one. I could touch type just like I was used to. Plus, the physical keyboard doesn’t take up any screen real estate. But it also meant having the cart around 2 devices: the iPad and a keyboard. And if you didn’t have a smart cover you would need a stand of some kind. In the end, for all the sense it made to have a physical keyboard it just seemed like a big hassle to effectively reproduce the laptop experience with a tablet. By the time you add up the cost of all of the accessories you may as well have just bought the laptop.

But this line of thinking is flawed. An iPad with all of these accessories is not the same as a laptop. For one thing the laptop is usually much larger. Full laptops have less battery life. They don’t have touch screens. They don’t have built in 3G connectivity12. They’re less versatile – you can’t leave the keyboard and mouse behind. They allow for more distractions with multiple windows and multi-tasking.

With the advances in OS X Lion a regular laptop can help with focus using full screen apps. But battery life is still a problem. And you have no choice but to cart around the keyboard and trackpad with you where ever you go. The difference between and touch screen and a mouse is huge. The touch screen feels much more intimate and tactile; like you’re interacting directly with the machine. Using a surrogate virtual finger just isn’t the same; it’s less accurate and fiddly.

So, after much pondering I decided to give the ZAGGfolio a try.

The Case

The case has a hard plastic exterior with a soft lining inside to protect the iPad from scratches. When opened and laying flat the keyboard takes up one side while the iPad slides into the other. The case is designed such that both the keyboard and iPad can be removed. During my tests I found it cumbersome to remove the keyboard. More often than not I would end up not having the keyboard properly aligned. In practice the removal of the keyboard is something I can’t imagine anyone doing with much frequency. The iPad on the other hand didn’t have this problem.

Inserting the iPad is very simple; so is removing it. The slide for the iPad is snug, but not so tight that it’s impossible to align it properly. If I had to complain about the snugness of the case I’d say that removing the iPad can be on the difficult side. I like to be very gentle with my iPad so the amount of force I had to use to grip the iPad while pulling it out was too much for me. I noticed that the LCD started showing some pressure effects which made me nervous. In order to remove the iPad I had to hold the iPad at the bezel and push the case off. This is in contrast to the feeling of pulling the iPad out of the case.

When the iPad is in the case all of the external ports and speaker are still available. The volume buttons and mute switch are along the top of the device when it’s open. The home button is halfway up the right side. The headphone jack is safely at the bottom on the left.

Speaking of the headphone jack: the case is has a notch, not a hole for the headphone jack. When I first saw this I didn’t understand what it was for. But after playing around with the case it became clear. Having a notch means that you can open and close the case with your headphones plugged in. If Zagg had chosen to just use a hole for the headphone jack you would have to remove your headphones any time you wanted to open or close the case. Smart.

The Keyboard

With the keyboard out the iPad can be put into it and used as an easel in any orientation: landscape or portrait, upside down or right side up, left or right. In addition to the keyboard’s ability to be used as an easel, the case can also act as a stand so that just the keyboard can be removed and used separately. I haven’t tried this configuration since I don’t see the utility, but it’s nice to know its there if I need it.

As you would expect, the keyboard contains the standard compliment of keys. In addition, there is a line of “function” keys along the top row of the keyboard. These keys give you quick access to all sorts of features. These keys are:

• Home, to go to the home screen.
• Spotlight, to go to the spotlight search.
• Picture Frame, to lock the screen and show a slide show of the photos in your camera roll.
• Keyboard, to toggle the on-screen keyboard.
• Cut, Copy and Paste, to do what you’d expect.
• Previous, Play/Pause, Next, to control media playback.
• Mute, Volume Up and Volume Down, to control volume.
• Lock, to turn off the screen and lock the iPad.

The keyboard is smaller than I’m used to. Even so, I found it to be perfectly be usable for anything I needed to type up. Using the external keyboard has been a really great experience. I like having the tactile feedback from a physical keyboard. Plus, having the physical keyboard means that I have more room on screen for the document I’m working on.

I did notice a few strange things with the keyboard layout though. For one, the screen lock key is directly above the backspace (or delete) key. If you mistype a word and need to correct it, you may end up inadvertently locking your screen. Many of the function keys really seemed like a stretch to me. Do I really need special keys dedicated to clipboard functions? If you’ve used a computer at all in the past 30 years you’ll probably be familiar with the standard key combinations for these commands. Do I need a key to turn on the on screen keyboard? Probably not. I bought an external keyboard so that I wouldn’t have to use the on screen one.

Perhaps I’m an outlier, but if I had to chose between having those function keys and having a larger inverted “T” for the arrow keys I would have picked the arrow keys.

Also, the caps lock key doesn’t have an indicator light. I never know if it’s on or off without first typing something. In practice I found this to be more of a nuisance than anything, but it still feels like an omission. My Apple Bluetooth keyboard has an indicator light and it runs on batteries, same as the ZAGG keyboard. Under normal usage, the indicator would only be on a tiny fraction of the amount of time the keyboard is in use.

Battery Life

When I got the ZAGGfolio home I opened the box, put my iPad in and started working with it. I never bothered to give the battery an initial charge; I just started using it with whatever juice came from the factory. In the month or so since I bought it I have yet to charge the keyboard battery. This is par for the course as far as Bluetooth keyboards go. I’m guessing I’ll need to charge the battery sometime in the next few months. But that brings up an interesting point.

The ZAGGfolio, and in fact all of the ZAGG Bluetooth keyboards for the iPad, have an internal, non user serviceable battery. This is a design trade off. On the positive side Zagg is free to design the keyboard however they want. Without any constraints around standard batteries and how the user will have to replace them Zagg was able to make the keyboard slimmer. But this also means that the user can’t replace the batteries when the run out. The user has to charge the device using the provided USB cable instead. The keyboard doesn’t come with a wall wart for charging, so you need to be near something that can charge a USB device.

Luckily, the charging light on the keyboard will flash when there’s about 20% battery remaining which should give enough time to find an outlet.

I thought the ZAGGfolio would be an interesting experiment. I knew it would make typing on the iPad a lot easier and make it more useable as a content creation device. What I didn’t know was how deeply it would affect me. When first using the Zaggfolio with the iPad I would constantly be trying to reach for a pointing device (mouse, trackpad, trackball) when I needed to move the cursor. After a while I got used to using the touch screen. But, after using the ZAGGfolio almost exclusively for a few days going back to the MacBook Air was a little jarring. I’d constantly be trying to reach up and touch the screen to tap on icons to drag things around. After using direct interaction for a short time, using a surrogate seemed crazy, slow, and abstract.

Keyboard Navigation

Unfortunately iOS isn’t designed from the ground up to use external keyboards and all of the interaction baggage they carry along. Specfically missing is the ability to tab between fields in data entry applications. I use OmniFocus to keep track of tasks that need to get done. But I can’t tab between fields when entering new tasks. I have to type, reach up, tap, repeat. It works alright, but it’s certainly not ideal.

Conclusion

I’m still sort of on the fence about the ZAGGfolio. I think it’s an interesting idea and very well executed. I’m just not sure it’s for me. At $100 it’s no small chunk of change. If you’re the kind of person that can get by without a laptop, need the extra versatility that it provides, or someone that travels a lot then you’d be hard pressed to find another accessory that offers what the ZAGGfolio offers.

If you don’t travel often, or are just as comfortable with a laptop then it’s a much harder sell.

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1. Although 3G connectivity isn’t built into every model it’s an option unlike a regular laptop. ↩

2. It’s true you can get 3G connectivity on a laptop using a MiFi or a Rocket Stick but these are addons. One’s an extra device you need to carry, the other is a USB dongle you have to plug in. Either way these are poor substitutes for built in support. ↩

Converting Shell Scripts into Applications

OS X doesn’t allow shell scripts to run as Login Items. Adding a shell script as a login item causes the script to be opened in an editor; not exactly what I had in mind. Login items need to be applications, but how do you convert a shell script into an application? Easy: Platypus.

Platypus is an open source project that packages up scripts as Mac applications. It works with pretty much any scripting language you can think of. It’s a really simple concept and it works well.

To convert a simple shell script into an application using Platypus you’ll need to follow these steps:

1. Enter the name of the application you want to generate. This will be the name of the file and what appears in the Finder, so be as descriptive as you need to be.
2. Select the type of script being wrapped and configure any arguments to the interpreter. If you’re wrapping a shell script you won’t need to do this as the default will work just fine.
3. Select the path to the script to wrap up as an application either by using the Select button or dragging and dropping the script into the field.
4. If the script generates output you might want to configure the output format. If there is no output from the application, or you don’t care about the output you can safely select “None”.

There are a bunch of other options such as the icon to use for the generated application, additional files to bundle, etc. Since I wanted my application to be used as a Login Item I wanted it to be as unintrusive as possible. The configuration options for my application were:

• Set “Output Type” to “None”.
• Check the “Run with Administrator privileges” checkbox.
• Check the “Run in background” checkbox.
• Uncheck the “Remain running after initial execution” checkbox.

Shell Command to Unmount Volumes

I recently decided that I wanted to have a 2nd installation of OS X laying around for testing purposes. Initially I thought of using VMWare Fusion or something similar. Being that my machine only has 4GB of RAM I didn’t think this would make for the best experience in the world so I discounted it.

The only other option was to either partition my hard drive or use an external drive. External drives are horrendously slow (when compared to the internal SSD of the MacBook Air) and aren’t portable. So partition the hard drive it was. For my own sanity I wanted to keep each of the installations as separate as possible. I really didn’t want each installation to see the other’s data. In a pinch I wrote up a quick shell script that takes care of this problem.

Here’s the script:

#!/usr/bin

mount | grep “/dev/” | grep -v “on / ” | awk ‘{ print $1}’ | xargs -n1 diskutil umount

It’s pretty simple when you break it down into its parts. This single command works because the Unix shell allows the output of one command to become the input for the next. Here’s a breakdown of what’s happening:

The mount command is executed which outputs a bunch of lines, one for each mounted volume. Each line looks similar to the following:

/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)

This is saying that the disk /dev/disk0s2 is mounted at the root of the file system, /, with the hfs, local, and journalled options. Of these pieces of information all I really care about is the name of the disk. I really just want to isolate the local disks from other disks and file systems. That’s where the first grep command comes in.

The listing of volume information is used as the input to grep, a program that filters out the lines that don’t match a regular expression. In this case we’re looking for lines that contain /dev/ somewhere on them. This initial processing with grep takes care of all of the non-local volumes. But there’s a problem. The system is booted from a local volume. If that volume isn’t filtered out then there will be problems later on. Likely one of the commands will fail. That’s what the 2nd invocation of grep is for.

The output of the grep command can be inverted so that it will only output lines that do not match a regular expression. Since I wanted the script to be generic, and the device name will be different for each installation I couldn’t filter based on the name. Luckily however, I could just filter out the line that contains the expression on /. The reason I can do that is because the volume that contains the system will always be mounted at the root of the file system. Note here that the expression contains a trailing space; this is important because without it all of the lines would match and therefore there would be no output.

With the output of the mount command successfully trimmed down to just the lines containing local volumes that aren’t the startup volume I can remove the pieces of information from the lines that I don’t care about. Or, to put it more precisely, just output the data I do care about: the device name. Say hello to awk.

The awk command is a handy tool that can perform all sorts of manipulations to its input. awk works well in situations where the data being processed is columnar. In the case of the output of mount the data could be considered as space-separated-values with the device name in the first column. In order to get awk to just print out the first column of each record we use the script { print $1}. If you were to just execute the command pipeline up to the end of the awk command you would see a listing of all of the device names that contain currently mounted volumes that are not the startup volume. The last thing we need to do is unmount them.

There are several ways to unmount volumes on a Mac. I’ve chosen to use the diskutil command but others I’m sure would work fine. One of the shortcomings of the diskutil command is that it will only allow you to pass a single device name to the umount subcommand. It also expects that the device name will be passed on the command line; it won’t read device names from standard input. That’s where the wonderful and magical xargs command comes in.

xargs takes as arguments a the first part of a command to execute. To that it appends the contents of each line that it reads from standard input. By default xargs tries to batch the data into as few commands as possible but since diskutil will only take a single device name at a time the -n1 switch needs to be used. -n1 tells xargs to execute the command for each line.

xargs is an amazing command. It took me a while to get my head wrapped around it but once I did it opened up a world of possibilities. It’s the most complicated piece of the pipeline but it’s also the one that makes it work as a single command. Without xargs I would have had to resort to some kind of a loop and variables. That may be easier to read but it’s certainly less concise.

But this script alone doesn’t solve the problem. It needs to run at login, and that requires a different solution.