Nik's Blog

Geekery, witty insights, software (of dubious quality) and more!

Turn a shell script into a Dashboard Widget

Andy Herbert released a bitchin’ (did I just date myself?) little bundle for TextMate, which takes any shell script you whip up in TextMate and turns it into a Dashboard widget. Click the widget, run the script. Easy as can be.

Widgets can show their output (it opens it up in Console.app) and can also accept dragged items (and pass them as a variable to the script).

Awesome tool for making something clickable out of a shell script. Perfect for the weird little utilities you need to run now and again. (Like my script to reload a crapped out Cisco VPN kernel extension when I forget to disconnect before sleeping my Mac.)

You can read about it here, watch a movie of the bundle in action or just download the bundle directly.

@inik

inik: I love Dropbox because it's indispensible on an iPhone. Was the top of the list of things I recommended to my bro. http://t.co/AnMAp1K4 >
inik: RT @alexismadrigal: Yup, @Salon cut the number of stories they post, increased their quality, and got a 40% traffic boost. http://t.co/X ... >
inik: RT @mikememoli: "The NFL: We're working on that whole brain injury thing." >
inik: I am a sucker for dog ads. Add Ponda Baba and it's like bliss. >
inik: Live stream only available to Verizon customers. Wonder how much that cost them. Anyone know? #superbowl >

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I love Seth's quote at the top. I think that's my new motto.. ; )

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Griping about OS X Lion? Here's two nifty tools that replace a variety of poorly supported third party tools: Command-line and Automator access to video and audio conversion. Super easy to use, and very flexible and supports any format that Quicktime can encode/decode. (So Perian is a must-install if you want to handle DivX/3viX, etc.)

Yes, ffmpeg, Handbrake and...
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Fix Google Reader's horrible new interface with this user script! Now it fits nicely on my MacBook's small screen. >
Happy 11/11/11 11:11:11! >
What makes this ad awesome is not the true-to-life irony, because the idea is hardly innovative, but rather the excellent execution. Reminds me a bit of that excellent Nutri-Grain spec commercial. Quick delivery, good actors, hit all the high notes. Love it. >