This AppleScript creates new files in the currently Finder folder, based on file templates you create. These templates are just documents of any sort that you put into the “New File Templates” folder in your documents folder. (This folder name can be edited as a script property.) This is basically equivalent to the “New…” contextual menu item in Windows.

I’ve gotten in the habit of attach meeting notes and brainstorming documents to my Evernote notebooks. They’re editable from the notebook and sync to all my computers and my phone, which is incredibly handy. One limitation that I’ve found is that it’s impossible to create a brand new document within Evernote… until now!

This AppleScript creates new files in the currently selected/viewed note, based on file templates you create. These templates are just documents of any sort that you put into the “New File Templates” folder in your documents folder. (This folder name can be edited as a script property.) When you run the script, it will let you select from those templates, set your file name, and then you’ll have a new file right there in your note! Easy peasy!

Note that you may want a premium Evernote account in order to handle the upload size of adding lots of files.

I recently discovered a great little service, ifttt. The name is a cute abbreviation of “If This Then That,” which is exactly what it does.

The service works on a simple macro-like structure where you add a triggering event (If This) and then a task to do (Then That). Triggers and tasks are both hooked into a wide variety of web services, including social networks, Evernote, DropBox, and more. I’ve already set up a handful of workflows, some of which archive my social networking posts in Evernote (since the social networks themselves aren’t all that searchable), and one that lets me phone in new tasks to OmniFocus.

Very cool service, currently free, and the potential uses of it are infinite. Definitely worth checking out!

Had to update a set of Facebook applications for WCM. (Yup, still freelancing a little for them.) This is the third time these applications have needed a major upgrade to meet Facebook’s ever-changing API – once to migrate from FBML to FBJS, and again to move to Oauth, and no again to meet Oauth 2.0 as iFrame tabs and apps.

Facebook, being the 800 pound gorilla, can do whatever it wants, and the developers who have invested so much in the platform will, ultimately, get in line or just fail entirely. But this really hurts the small developers with modest projects, especially as some of the standby Facebook apps like Static FBML die out and paid services start charging “enterprise” prices.

To Facebook’s credit, they’ve put effort into sunsetting APIs cleanly, with advance warning (sometimes as little as 4 weeks, but usually quite a bit better) and even letting old APIs continue to work… for a while. But they haven’t handled QA at all well, which is exactly where this problem hit.

In the case of this client of WCM, they have a handful of custom, fan-gated tabs, as well as a full blown contest application, which was custom designed to meet their jurisdiction’s gaming regulations. (Otherwise, they could probably get away with any of the other contest apps out there.) When Oauth 2.0 was introduced, Facebook accidentally introduced a boatload of bugs into the supposedly still-supported legacy authorization API, which meant that in the middle of a major promotion, the contest stopped working entirely. This led to a crunch day of moving to the new APIs, which were still buggy as heck and not nearly as feature-rich as the old APIs.

Due to these holes in the API, a great deal of the work had to be custom built using curl commands and manual decoding of returned data, and other nonsense that really shouldn’t have been necessary since Facebook’s published PHP library ought to handle that sort of thing. Luckily, the tab-based apps weren’t affected (they didn’t need to authorize visitors); and since the new API, inexplicably, couldn’t handle fan-gating, they weren’t transitioned.

So now Facebook has killed support for the old API entirely, and requires tabs to move to iFrames (just like applications always have). Because of this, the fan-gating on the tabs (remember, they COULDN’T transition to the new API when it was first released!) broke, and again, WCM was in a crunch with the client since they were in the middle of a major Facebook promotion.

This much is good: The new API, iFrame tabs, and Oauth 2.0, now that they’re mature, are a lot easier to code for than the old system, so the old apps were fairly easy to set up, even though one of them (due to its reliance on non-iFrame-compatible FacebookJS) had to be entirely re-written from the ground up. Everything was no longer on fire within 3 or 4 hours. But there are, of course, lingering bugs due to the major changes in how an iFrame app needs to be managed, which present a substantial challenge to fix, since Facebook’s documentation in regard to these little bugs is limited to the old API – entirely useless.

Okay, enough of my bitching. The end result here is that in order to be a Facebook developer, you need to be on the cutting edge of their API at all times, but only RELEASE when Facebook gets around to making the new API stable and complete, which sometimes doesn’t happen until after they’ve broken your app. Meantime, you’re praying that your clients don’t get stuck with something that just plain doesn’t work because Facebook accidentally introduces bugs/improvements into their legacy API.

As Facebook looks to extend the Facebook platform outside of Facebook, this becomes untenable. If I’m relying on Facebook for users to register for my site, it simply has to work 100% of the time. I cannot be required to update substantial portions of my applications and websites multiple times each year. Doing so doesn’t make me any money, so unless I’m Wildfire or another company that can spread that cost over a large number of clients, it ends up being a drag on resources and revenue. This, of course, is why Buddy Media and the rest can start jacking up their prices from hundreds of dollars each month to thousands, leaving smaller companies to use the low cost tools which end up falling behind the API… same problems. (Ironically, even Facebook’s cut-and-paste social plugins have fallen behind the API and required instant upgrades to new code.)

So what am I doing? Well, nothing at all that’s mission-critical is ever going to be integrated with Facebook. I know there are benefits in hooking these things up, but I can’t afford maintaining these things or losing functionality because I overlooked a blog post. For clients, it’s going to have to be a program built by one of the major Facebook app companies, and they’ll have to cover the cost.

It’s a shame, too. My clients have seen awesome results using some clever custom applications, but if I can’t guarantee a modicum of reliability and uptime, the hit on my reputation will far outweigh a handful of successful campaigns.

I just updated my site’s theme… again. Still orange, still looks like someone other than a designer (that’s me!) built it, but it’s a little better. If nothing else, I’ve jumped onboard the “Responsive Web Design” bandwagon, so this site looks pretty (if not “purty”) in mobile browsers. A good learning experience to set that up.

Hopefully I can rope a designer friend into building me a proper theme, but until then, this one will be in a perpetual Beta state, along with the rest of this site.

This script exports your TextExpander snippets as “.kmmacros” files, suitable for import into Keyboard Maestro 5 as typed key macros. Due to differences between the two applications, this is not a perfect conversion, so snippets that are likely to need additional work are marked with an asterisk after import.

This script uses BBEdit as an intermediary to build the files, but could fairly easily be altered to work with another text editor.

This handy little applet generates a pretty sitemap in OmniGraffle based on a standard XML sitemap file. This is extremely useful for web developers and designers who need a comprehensive diagram of an existing website’s layout. The graphical sitemap also contains hyperlinks and fully searchable text of each page it maps.

There’s plenty of password generators out there, but how many of them generate passwords that are both secure as well as convenient?

This script creates just such passwords.

Convenience: The passwords this script generates can by typed with just one hand on the keyboard, and can also be entered into an iPhone without going back and forth between letters and numbers and symbols and capital letters. The passwords also use normal dictionary words that are easy to remember.

Secure: Every password is at least 12 characters long and contains a combination of letters, numbers, symbols, upper case and lower case letters.

Are you sure that’s secure?

Okay, sure, a totally random string of letters and numbers and whatnot would be more secure than any password that uses dictionary words. However, by using two words, as well as numbers and symbols, these passwords meet a nice balance between convenience and security. It’s a lot easier for me to remember “fate64$!SWAGER” than “}Uc^nGRJ3X3F”, and of course it’s easier to type the former too.

The truly paranoid should move along, though. If an attacker knew you were using this system, then they would have a much smaller set of possibilities for a brute-force attack – and the ability to just download the script and steal the word dictionary.

Update: Added about a thousand more words to the list to make this more secure. There are now over four million potential combinations of words, letters and symbols.

This is a handy little AppleScript that takes all the clutter on your desktop and packs it up neatly and out of the way. Run it again, and it’ll unpack you and put your mess back just the way you like it. Handy for presentations or before you have visitors.

Run this script, and all the files and folders on your desktop will be cleaned up and dropped into a “Desktop Items” folder. When you’re ready to get back to work, run the script again, and everything from the Desktop Items folder will get put back where it came from, as though they had never left.

And yes, you are free to keep working on files in the Desktop Items folder until you’re ready to unpack. If you add items to the desktop after de-cluttering it, you can just run the script again to pack those ones up, or you can unpack right on top of them. Totally up to you. The “Clean Up” command is handy here to avoid double-decker icons.

Disks and whatnot on your desktop are just tidied up by name, no big whoop.

A lot to say about a simple script. Run. Clean. Run. Messy.

This is a collection of three AppleScripts to generate “greek” type to fill in for designers and anyone else who just needs some random copy.

There are three different versions of placeholder text:

Lorem Ipsum: Generates a random set of paragraphs using the much-loved Lorem Ipsum passage.

Lorem Chomsky: Generates obscure and academic text in the style of Noam Chomsky

Lorem Bullshit: Pardon the colorful wording, but this is aptly named. It creates Dot-com/IT/Web-2.0 marketing BS speak. Synergies and paradigms abound!

Run these scripts to generate three paragraphs. If you execute from LaunchBar you can pass a string with the number of paragraphs you’d like to generate.

The dictionaries were adapted from other sources and are credited within the scripts’ source.