Markdown to Word is a ginchy little service that will take Markdown-formatted text, and put it into Microsoft Word, making use of Word’s style sheets to do so.

This is in all ways identical in function to my previous TextMate script which does the same thing, except that this also auto-formats once in Word.

You may notice some funniness in the conversion. Lists, in particular, sometimes don’t convert perfectly. This is part of Apple’s textutil program, which is very handy, but sometimes a little… er… special in how it handles things. I take neither blame nor credit for its output.

IMPORTANT! This service relies on the setfile utility, included with Apple’s free “XCode” developer tools. You’ll need to have those installed (at least the developer applications).

And, of course, this program wouldn’t exist were it not for John Gruber’s “Markdown.” Mr. Gruber retains all copyright, etc., to said code. Disclaimers can be read below and are included with the Zip archive.

http://www.daringfireball.net/markdown

I am eternally grateful to Mr. Gruber for giving me Markdown. Without it, I’d probably be writing in LaTEX or something. Ugh.

Update: It turns out that when you set an applet as the default application for some particular file type, it doesn’t “stick.” So now I suppose I need to go to ApplescriptObjC, since AppleScript Studio is dead… Ugh.

Do you ever find yourself unintentionally opening an HTML file in Safari, when you really want to open it in BBEdit; or watch Photoshop open up when you just wanted to preview a JPEG?

WhichApp is a little applet that aims to fix this problem. When you open a file with WhichApp, it will present you with a configurable list of applications you can use to open the file. Pick your favorite app, and you’re in business!

Just double click on the applet to build your list of applications. Get Info on a file, choose “Other…” as the default application, and then select WhichApp. Now every time you open that file, you can pick which program ought to open it! Change the setting for all files of that type, and you can avoid the frustration of opening the wrong program every time you open that kind of file!

And, yes, you can duplicate WhichApp and rename it as many times as you want so you can have different selection lists for different file types.

WhichApp was developed on Snow Leopard and hasn’t been tested anywhere else. It’s just an AppleScript, though, so it should work everywhere.

Updated October 2, 2009!

With Snow Leopards new services support, I’ve updated the old “Send to Evernote” service to include three services:

• Clip Text to Evernote: This is the original “Send to Evernote” service, with the improvements provided by Snow Leopard. This service takes selected text and turns it into an Evernote note. It will also grab the name of the frontmost window for the title of the note so that you’ll remember where you clipped it from.

• Clip URLs to Evernote: This takes any selected URLs, and downloads the contents of those URLs into Evernote. Very handy if you have a reading list of URLs and want to save them for later.

• Clip Files to Evernote: This will accept files and folders and attempt to clip them to Evernote. In some cases this will fail if the file isn’t supported by Evernote (although premium users can attach anything they want). If it is a supported file type, the document’s contents will become the note, rather than just attaching as a file.

Installation’s easy. Just unzip the archive, and put the services you wantin your ~/Library/Services/ folder (make one if it doesn’t already exist).

This will also let you get rid of the little elephant in your menu bar if you like.

This script uses BBEdit to convert HTML to lightly formatted text. Unlike BBEdit’s “Translate” utility, this maintains links, image ALT text, and even formats headers and bold text as all-caps. The formatting is ideal for making plain text versions of HTML email messages — which is the reason I created it in the first place.

For best results, drop this in the BBEdit Scripts folder. (you can open it from BBEdit’s script menu!)

Now you can browse the iTunes Music Store and search for songs you like in the higher-quality, cheaper, and DRM-free Amazon MP3 store!

Just select some songs you like while browsing the iTMS and run this script, and your browser will open up searches for each selected song. If you don’t have any songs selected, it’ll just search for the first song in the list.

Why would you want this? Well, the iTMS has a very nice browser and some convenient integration with your playlist (especially with the new Genius sidebar). This way you can take advantage of that nice browser, but still buy a high quality, DRM free, MP3 version of the songs you want.

It’s kinda like going to Best Buy to try out a computer and then buying the computer on Amazon. Except with music.

OMNIFOCUS URI HANDLER

This applet enables you to create new tasks using an “x-omnifocus” URL. This is particularly designed to make it easy to add tasks from a web browser via a bookmarklet, without having to code a separate script for each browser. This also works in browsers that don’t support AppleScript. (I’m looking at you, Firefox!!!)

It also supports more advanced URLs containing context and project assignments that you’re likely to create from web page bookmarklets. This functionality can be utilized to make it easier to add OmniFocus tasks from other applications, shell scripts, etc., without having to hook into complicated AppleScript.

This is a simple program to reduce the size of your iMovie 08 library.

I love iMovie ‘08. I know, I know, it has less whizzy features than iMovie ‘06 does, but darn it, it’s so darn fast and easy to build videos. I can create a whole hour-long movie in about ten minutes! (Not a very good one, of course — but none of my movies are very good.)

Part of why it’s fast is that it keeps all my clips on hand, ready and willing to be part of my latest (crappy) movie. Unfortunately, all those barely-compressed DV clips take up A LOT of space. (About 10 GB/hour of video!) This application will compress all the DV files in your iMovie library to save huge amounts of disk space! Using Apple’s H.264 compression technology, you can shave 70% off your library space with minimal loss of quality.

UPDATE: v1.2 works with SetFile installed in /usr/bin as well as in the default /Developer/Tools directory.

As cool as stacks are for some folders, they are a real step backwards for most folders. When you add a folder to the dock, it displays nothing except a stack of documents, which are often identical to those in other dock-bound folders. Your custom icons to view your folders are gone, in favor of generic nonsense.

With any luck, Apple will pull their collective head out of their collective ass and make folders in the dock work better, but until then, you have Badge Leopard Stacks to bring back custom folder icons to your dock stacks.

This is a simple AppleScript that fits nicely on your Finder windows’ toolbar. When opened, it creates an alias of the currently open folder inside that folder and names it so that it will always be on top when sorted by name. The result of this is that when you view a folder on your dock as a “stack,” it will actually display the icon of the folder first, rather than a collection of meaningless documents.

As an added bonus, clicking on this alias will open the folder, which may make it easier to open the folder from the stack.

This doesn’t work well at all for stacks that are sorted by anything other than “name.” So it goes.

A number of people seemed to enjoy my coverage of how poorly most Mac archiving programs work with Mac/HFS+ metadata. However, a number of people also thought that I might have tested incorrectly (it’s possible!) and wanted to know how other sorts of utilities (such as file synchronization programs) handled Mac files.

The New Stikkit Package is a collection of utilities which allow you to quickly and easily add new “stikkits” to the Stikkit.com service. (Read more about Stikkit right here!)

This package includes…

• An application so you can add new Stikkits right from your dock!

• An AppleScript which you can launch thru the Script Menu or your favorite alternate script launcher

• You can use the scripts with LaunchBar or Quicksilver so that you can seamlessly add new Stikkits without even leaving your current context

• Perhaps most excitingly, it also includes a “Make New Stikkit” service, so you can send text to Stikkit from within any application that supports services!

This is a simple AppleScript droplet which includes a binary of the TiVoDecode program. Just drag and drop your .tivo files on it and get an MPEG-2 video out. You can then use other tools to convert that MPEG-2 into something else.

Documentation is included. If you need help getting your .tivo files onto your Mac or converting MPEG-2 files into something more useful, try Google. Problems with the decoding (such as missing audio and other weirdness) are best addressed on the tivodecode sourceforge page. I will not be supporting this program beyond the functionality of the basic AppleScript wrapper.

UPDATE 9/07: There is a great open-source alternative to this little script that is, really, a lot better. Take a look at TiVo Decode Manager.

Introducing Send to KGTD Advanced Version 3.1!

…Now featuring full support for international character sets to support productive people around the world!

This is a simple, powerful script which allows you to quickly enter tasks, projects and/or contexts to your Kinkless GTD file. It’s faster and easier than doing it by hand via OmniOutliner, or using any other scripts out there!

New in Version 3.0

• Full Unicode support! The parsing engine has be re-written from scratch so now non-Roman character sets are fully supported.
• Support for KGTD files without date columns
• Support for KGTD custom inbox sections (uses meta-inbox)
• No longer requires any scripting additions!

Fully integrate your email with Kinkless GTD!

Updated September 21, 2006: Removed link creation to work around a bug in a recent security update.

Have you ever been in your car, and you just want to remind yourself to pick up a certain CD on Amazon because you’re digging on the current tune on the radio?

Do you have web forms that send you tech support requests and you’d like to get those requests in your Kinkless GTD file?

Do you sometimes just want to remind yourself to follow up on an email, but you’d rather have everything in one place, and so you end up filing an email and then creating a task to follow up on it in KGTD, and pretty soon you can’t remember where anything is?

The perfect script for the obsessive-compulsive iTunes user! Want to make sure all your albums have artwork? Then this is the script for you!

When run, this script will create a new playlist, entitled “::No Album Art::”, containing all your iTunes music tracks which don’t have any associated album artwork. (This is best used after running Find Album Artwork from the iTunes 7 Advanced menu.)

Once you have all your artless files in a playlist, you can then easily update their artwork manually, or using the Album Art widget for Dashboard, the iTunes Companion Yahoo Widget, or any of the many other album art grabbers.

This set of Applescripts lets you use OmniOutliner Pro to keep a variety of lists on your computer and easily add items to them from the script running application of your choice. (Including LaunchBar or Quicksilver!) These lists can also be set up to automatically sync to your iPod as iPod notes in order to take ‘em with you on the road.

What kind of lists? Well, anything! A list of presents to buy, movies to rent, books to read, things to do before you die, groceries to pick up, names for your unborn child… The mind boggles!

A lot of people use text files for these kinds of lists. Call me an interface nerd, but I prefer something a little more… robust to maintain my lists. Specifically, I like OmniOutliner. So, I made this little program to give me the ease of use and flexibility of a text file within the wonderful interface of OOP.