You don’t have to be a geek (or nerd, or goober) to use the new features (see Enhancements below). Anyone with Entourage and an iDisk will be able to use the attachments functionality.

The installation is still the same as the first release. Here are the previous instructions:

1. Unzip and save in “~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items”
2. Rename “Create Task from Message\cT.scpt” to “Create Task from Message.scpt”
3. Start Entourage (you do not need to restart if its already running).
4. Highlight a message and hit ^T.
5. Follow the onscreen instructions.
6. Get organized!

I don’t like to repeat myself, so here’s the release notes, which covers the new features:

Version History
v0.2 – July 6, 2008
- Enhancements
- Ability to configure a remote disk to store files, and add the URL to the RTM task’s URL field.
- Tested only with iDisk.
- Requires the remote disk to be mountable via WebDAV.
- The URL will be http://[remoteURL you enter]/RTM-Attachments
- You can change the name of the folder via the remoteDiskFolder variable in the properties declaration section below
- Uploads may take a while, depending on speed, size of upload, and other factor that I can’t predict. Be patient.
- Stuff you can store on the remote drive:
- One or more, or all, of the attachments of an email
- The entire email, as a .eml file
-
- Only the text/plain parts of a message are added to the notes of a task, gone is all the formatted stuff that didn’t look right anyways and was pretty unlegible.
- Large notes are broken up, instead of truncated, and fed into RTM in reverse order, so that the notes can be read just like the original email.
- Known issues
- useEmailToCreateTasks doesn’t work when using the remote disk folder and attachments. The task gets created, but everything (list name and URL) end up in the notes. However, try the new API functionality, as it’s way improved with the breakdown of large notes.
v0.1 – Initial release

Here’s the high level logic for creating attachments, for the interested parties. (Click for a bigger picture)

I’ll do my best to answer your questions in the comments.

Get it here.

Update: Updated the version, as the previous one had a bug with certain special characters in filenames and/or subject lines. I had also (accidentally) distributed the last scpt as read-only.

Update 2: Added a screen walkthrough here.

Update 3: A few more fixes and enhancements:

v0.2c – July 6, 2008
- Enhancements
- Allows for configurable task title naming during task creation
- See editTaskTitle below
- Bug Fixes
- More special character handling
v0.2b – July 6, 2008
- Bug Fixes
-Replaced certain special characters in filenames and subjects to avoid filesystem errors

Technorati Tags: Attachments, Entourage, Organize, Remember the Milk, RTM, simplify

And I’ve installed a lot of software. And I’ve removed a lot of software. And some sits around being unused.

Well, here are my lists of Mac software I use, recommend, and why – in no particualr order, just as it comes to my head. Keep in mind, this all on top of the standard Mac OS X software, including iLife ’08.

Stuff everyone should have: (Don’t complain, it’s all free, but you should donate)

• Smultron – Free – Text Editor. You have to have a text editor. OS X’s built-in TextEdit is fine, but Smultron gives you code highlighting, indenting, tag completion, and SO much more.
• Quicksilver – Free – Launcher application and much more. Use it to find and launch an application, take shortcuts to common tasks like sending an email, or use one of the myriad plugins to extend your favorite application. (I use it to create Remember the Milk tasks all the time). It can index your entire computer so you can find files. Just install it and definitely go through some of the screencasts – I learned a lot through the screencasts, which really opened my eyes to the power of Quicksilver.
• Adium – Free – Instant Messaging aggregator tool. Yes, iChat is nice, and I love the screen share, video chat, and audio chat. But most of the time, I just need to IM with someone on one of 5 of the networks. Adium lets me connect to all of them, combine multiple listings of a person to a single contact, and it’s actually more intuitive than iChat because all my contacts are in a single list.
• UnRarX – Free – You’re going to have RAR files you have to deal with at some point. If you’re not trying to create RAR files, but just extract the contents, this is a great little app that just works easily and well.
• Skitch – Free (in beta) – Screen capture & image sharing utility. Great options for capturing the screen, including timed shots. You can also quickly share the shots via your mySkitch site, or .Mac site, all from within Skitch.
• FireFox – Free – Web Browsing. Duh. Just do it.
• VLC (Video LAN Client) – Free – Video playback. Great compatibility with every format I’ve come across; pretty reliable. Anytime you go searching for how you should playback a video file (on any platform, really) people will always say VLC.
• Perian – Free – Along the same lines as VLC, Perian adds a bunch of codecs to Quicktime, allowing you to use Quicktime for most video playback. VLC may be more efficient and reliable, but Quicktime (and Front Row) are nice to look at and to use.
• Cyberduck – Free – File transfer utility. Great, just great. Provides all the functionality you want, doesn’t disappoint.

Kinda specific stuff:

• XBMCPlex – Free – Media Center software. A must have replacement for Front Row if you plan to use your Mac as a media center. Works with the Apple Remote. Get xTV, the Apple TV skin for XBMC and you’re all set.
• iWork – $70 – Apple’s office suite. Provides you with a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation applications. Really user-friendly, really easy to use. Great templates out of the box. Nice layout options. Love it. Can’t use it enough. (Mostly because no one else at work uses it)
• MarsEdit – $29.95 – Blogging software. If you blog on your Mac, you’ll love this app. It’s missing WYSIWYG functionality, but it has everything else: it’s scriptable, calls external editors, and works with most blogging sites/software. (None of the blogging software out there has WYSIWYG if it connects with any blogging services)

Truly specialized stuff:

• Parallels – $80 – Virtual machine for running Windows or Linux side-by-side with OS X. If you’re just making the transition from Windows to the Mac, this is a must-have. I found it hard to make a clean, fresh break from Windows. But I was able to transition to all the Mac apps and not lose productivity by using the Windows apps I was accustomed to. See also: VMWare Fusion
• Crossover – $60 – Another solution for running Windows software on your Mac, using the open-source Wine Windows emulation software. Crossover provides a GUI for installing common (and supported) Windows applications. The biggest drawback is usually that the graphics in a Crossover-installed application will not render very quickly. But it reduces your memory overhead from running full-fledged Windows (512MB to 1GB+) to just the application itself (likely less than 100MB). I’m a big fan of Crossover.
• VisualHub – $23.32 – Video conversion. Takes in pretty much any format and spits out a huge array of formats (AVI, MP4, M4V, MOV, WMV, etc.). Gets rid of all the complexity and you just have to choose the output quality you want. See also: Handbrake for DVD-to-AVI conversion.
  Techspansion is no longer developing or selling VisualHub.

Alright. Well that’s it for now. I’ll try to keep this list updated, as life goes on.

Got some favorite apps you think should be on the “gotta have it” list? Tell me in the comments.

Technorati Tags: applications, Lists, Mac, software

What is it?

Amazon S3 (Super Simple Storage) is basically a pretty cheap ($0.15/GB at the time of this writing) storage cloud that anyone can use. Well, anyone with an Amazon account. So, basically everyone.

How do I work with S3?
You have a lot of options of how to interact with S3:

• You can mount it as a disk on a Mac, Linux, or Windows machine, which I found to be unreliable.
• Use s3fox in Firefox (or Flock) to transfer to/from S3, which also provided me mixed results, at best.
• Use jets3t, which includes a GUI, across any Java-capable platform to transfer files, which worked the best for me. The only downside of this Java application is that it doesn’t integrate with any OS well, so drag and drop won’t work.

Update!! Oops, I was wrong! JetS3t does allow for drag-and-drop on my Mac. Even cooler!

• There’s also the command line s3cmd, which works pretty well, but there’s no progress indicator during file transfers.
• Some file transfer applications (like Panic’s Transmit) will let you transfer directly to S3, though I found them to be unreliable, too.

What can I do with it?

Store files, duh! Seriously, though, you can do a lot. You can share files with specific people, groups, or the public using normal URLs. You can create Torrents of your files to share on BitTorrent. jets3t helps you do all these functions in the UI.

Why I like it!

Well, I host quite a few files (many offsite backups), and when looking for a webhost, I’m always looking for lots of storage, which is generally expensive. The beauty of S3 is that I can store a lot of data up there, and I’m only charged for the storage ($0.15/GB) and transfer ($0.18/GB download, $0.10/GB upload) monthly.

So let’s suppose I upload 20GB my first month ( (20GB x $.15) + (20GB x $.1810) = $6.60$5.00 ).

Then the next month I update a few files, let’s say 1GB’s worth. And let’s say I also pull some files down, let’s say 5GB. So, ( (21GB x $.15) + (5GB x $.18) + (1GB x $.10) = $4.05$4.15 ). And all my files are still available.

Best of all, S3 provides a pretty damn fast connection. And since you can share files privately or publicly using standard URLs, you can link to them directly from webpages or use S3 for fast image hosting.

Bonus! S3 Mac App!

So, as I mentioned above, I like jets3t. However, launching it from within a Terminal window is tedious. So I used Platypus to create a Mac app file, which you can run from anywhere on your Mac.

jets3t.app.zip

Amazon S3 Initial Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

jets3t Initial Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Update: I discovered the upload pricing for Amazon S3 is only $0.10/GB.  I also discovered an error in my math above.

Technorati Tags: Amazon S3, Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage, Remote Storage

All caught up? Good. I played with RTM a bit more and decided I’m going to give it a try. It seems to work really well and lots of people have written integrations for it.

Add to this story that I’ve decided to use Entourage instead of Parallels & Outlook at work. Unfortunately, Entourage’s task management is abysmal.

Starting to see where I’m going with this?

While I found lots of integrations available for RTM and other applications, I couldn’t find anything for Entourage. AppleScript to the rescue!

Without getting into all the gory details, the script (see link below) will allow you to highlight a message in Entourage and create a task in RTM based on the message. The message’s subject will be the task name and the message’s body will end up as a note.

Instructions:
1. Unzip and save in “~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items”
2. Rename “Create Task from Message\cT.scpt” to “Create Task from Message.scpt”
3. Start Entourage (you do not need to restart if its already running).
4. Highlight a message and hit ^T.
5. Follow the onscreen instructions.
6. Get organized!

[Updated 2/24/2008] Added more steps for clarity.

(More information after the jump)

Create RTM Task\cT.scpt.zip

[poll=3]

Some requirements, also included in the script:

Script requirements (basically, my configuration… your milage may vary):
- Mac OS X 10.5.2
- Microsoft Mac Office 2008 w/Entourage
- XMLLIB osax by Satimage (Smile companion), available here: http://www.satimage.fr/software/en/downloads/downloads_companion_osaxen.html
- XML Tools 2.9 by Nate Night Software, available here: http://www.latenightsw.com/freeware/XMLTools2/

FAQ:
- Q1: What if I want to change the email address associated with my RTM account?
- A1: Open a terminal window and run this “defaults delete com.apple.Entourage-RTM”. You will quickly go through the authentication process again and be asked the email address you would like to send to.

(send me questions and I’ll expand the FAQ)

There are also some user-configurable settings:

User configurable variables

Use email or use the API to create RTM tasks?
Pros of API: not dependent on email transmission, instant notification of failures.
Cons of API: Not very robust, cannot handle large notes.
Pros of email: Assuming you’re using this for entourage, you already have email open. Very robust, can send in any variable for the task (see http://www.rememberthemilk.com/help/answers/sending/emailinbox.rtm). Even if the connection is temporarily lost, the email will queue and will eventually show up as a task.
Cons of email: You have these emails in your Sent Items. Clogging up the internet with email.

default setting: true
available settings: true, false

IMPORTANT!! If you plan to use the API, make sure this file exists at ~/Library/Application Support/Entourage-RTM.
The file should be named “encodeurl.sh”. You can copy this text and paste it into a new file.

#!/usr/bin/tclsh
package require http
puts [::http::formatQuery [lindex $argv 0] [lindex $argv 1]]

property useEmailToCreateTasks : true

Parsing is only relevant to the API calls. If set to 1, RTM will attempt to find a due date in the task subject. Probably not really useful, but I don’t see a big downside to it, either.
default setting: “1″
available settings: “1″, “0″

property chooseParse : “1″

ADVANCED USAGE ONLY. Will display a whole lot of popups during the task creation.

default setting: false
available settings: true, false

property debugOn : false

Good luck!

Technorati Tags: Applescript, automate, Entourage, Remember the Milk, RTM, Task

The latest in my quest simplify my life is Remember The Milk. I just signed up today. Anyone tried it out? Have anything to say? Post it in the comments. Love to hear from you before I invest too much time, you know?

Link

Technorati Tags: Lists, Organize, Remember the Milk, simplify, Tasks, To Do

I sent over a MS Word doc and got back a perfect PDF representation within a few minutes. Not too shabby.

I realize there are a lot of free PDF conversion print drivers and applications out there. But why muck up my system when someone else can do it and I don’t have to worry about settings, system resources, all that stuff?

Cool.

FYI: It looks like there is an option to upload files larger than 10MB to have them converted, also. I didn’t try that option.

Koolwire Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Technorati Tags: PDF, PDF Conversion

• You change your mailing address for your bills to PayTrust’s secure processing address
• You can add your expected bills to PayTrust, or just wait for them to start telling you they received bills.
• If you haven’t pre-configured your bill to arrive at PayTrust, they will alert you of an unanticpated bill, and you can go in and setup a biller for the bill.
• If the bill is expected, they email you who the bill is from, how much it is, and when its due.
• You can pay the bill via PayTrust (direct debit from your bank account) or via another mechanism (I use Quicken‘s Bill Pay integration with Bank of America).
• If you want to see the bill, you can login to PayTrust and via your bill online. You can even download a PDF of the bill.

So far this has worked pretty well. I haven’t had any issues, and I haven’t lost any bills (that I know of).

What would I change?

• Its a bit disappointing that even though Intuit owns PayTrust and Quicken, there’s not any integration between them. I would love to see my PayTrust bills show up in Quicken and I could just pay them from my Quicken interface.
• The direct debit to make a payment gets taken out ~5 business days prior to when you want it to arrive at the biller. Bank of America doesn’t charge me till the date I want it to arrive there – even though they probably did send the money earlier. Bank of America treats it more like writing a check: it’s not really “arrived” until the other party has actually received the payment.
• The quality of the scan is somewhat poor. At home I was scanning ~600 dpi, it looks like the scans PayTrust makes are around 75-100 dpi. Its generally legible, but c’mon, space is cheap!

PayTrust Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Technorati Tags: Bill Pay, PayTrust, Quicken

As I was out there looking once again for the latest offerings of uPnP servers, I came across nullriver’s MediaLink (for PS3) and Connect360 (for the, well… you can guess).

I installed both on my mac (yeah, native apps!). They both quickly dipped into my iTunes and offered iPhoto integration (no integration offered for Aperture). They even let me pick which folders to share, presumably for videos.

I got them both configured, thinking I would give them both a go and see which worked best for me.

Well, as you can guess from the title, Connect360 is the clear winner, for many reasons:

• The PS3 interface sucks ass. There’s very little anyone can do about that, so there’s that.
• MediaLink let me traverse the shared folders on my mac, but none of the files actually showed up.
• Connect360 showed all my files, let me quickly sort through them, and let me fast forward, rewind, and pause my videos without an issue.
• While the XBox 360 UI is no gem, it’s usable – there I said it again. The PS3 really blows.
• It all worked with Connect360 on the first try.

Now, how much will I use this capability? I dunno. Now that I can play DivX files, maybe more often than previously expected. But it’s nice to know it’s there – and it’s easy enough to use.

I wonder if I’ll still need to get an Apple TV (take 2). Hmmmm…. probably… but for all the wrong reasons

Here’s what happens with Callwave:

• I change my voicemail forwarding phone number from the AT&T voicemail center to the Callwave voicemail number.
• Anyone calling me and leaving me a voicemail gets my Callwave voicemail box.
• I get a text message with a voice-2-text translation of the voicemail!!
• I get an email with a link to open my voicemail online.
• My dashboard widget updates and tells me I have a new voicemail, who it’s from, and I can play it right from my widget.
• I can check my voicemail by calling my mobile number or the Callwave voicemail number.

So, basically I lose absolutely no functions, and I get voice-2-text messages and email of the voicemail. Freakin’ awesome!

After trying everything I could think of, I remembered that I had made a snapshot not too long ago. And since all my data was in the shared profile (i.e. in the Mac file system), I wouldn’t lose anything important. So I simply restored to the last snapshot, and Voila!, everything worked perfectly. My biggest pain after that? Re-syncing MS Outlook’s ost file. And I could live with that.

Well, I went to pick up my Lenovo T60p from our help desk. It took almost a month to arrive, and I was excited to get it. When I get there I noticed a whole row of Macbooks getting configured. I was surprised to see so many Macs, because as far as I knew our company didn’t support Macs as corporate computers. So I asked if we were now supporting Macs. The help desk guy actually went on and on telling me how much better they are, easier to maintain, more reliable, faster, etc. He showed me Parallels in Coherence mode (which rocks) and we talked about Boot Camp. By the end of our conversation, I wanted a Macbook Pro. He mentions that they’re the same price, and he has a 15″ MBP not allocated to anyone else. So I traded him. He gave my T60p to someone else and configured the MBP for me.

And I like it. I really, really like my Macbook Pro. So much so that I bought one for Neela. We were able to consolidate her iBook and her IBM R52 pieces of crap into one Macbook Pro running Parallels, too.

The only reason the Mac works for me is Parallels. Though, now, after using my MBP for about a month I only use Windows on my MBP for MS Office (primarily Outlook). Everything else works just fine in Mac OS X.

So yes I’m a convert. And it’s all easily explained by my earlier post about simplifying. Anything that makes my life easier is more than welcome. iLife and iWork simplify so many things, as does Automator.

While I’ve been able to do 99% of all my work and tasks in Ubuntu, it’s not always easy to do what I want to do. I have found that ease is more and more important to me as I have less and less time. When I want to buy a piece of hardware that will simplify my life, it should be easy to hook it up, install it, and get it running. Any delays, workarounds, and other distractions take away from the overall goal.

For example, I love my Quicken. I use it forecast, budget, and report on expenditures. I have One-Step Update running and all my passwords saved so it’s easy to download all my transactions. On Ubuntu, I have to run Quicken in a Crossover bottle. Yes, it works. But it wasn’t easy. And anytime there’s an upgrade or any issues, it’s not easy to troubleshoot and resolve.

I’ve gone paperless in my house, as much as possible. When bills come in, they get scanned then shredded. We’re also going through and scanning historical bills, statements, and other paper documents. We save everything as PDFs. Our scanners include dual-sided scanning via the ADF. The Windows driver works great with Adobe Acrobat. However, the driver for Linux supports only one sided scanning at a time. There is software to scan one side, then refeed the documents and scan the other side, and it will collate the images and let you save it as a PDF. But guess what? That’s right. It took work. Not easy.

The list goes on, of course. RAW image support in The Gimp takes longer to be released than Photoshop. Any new device may not work in Linux for some period of time. Etcetera, etcetera.

So I was able to install Windows XP on a separate HDD (which was supposed to be a mirror for my Ubuntu installation, but it wasn’t easy and I never figured it out). I did take the time to keep grub as the bootloader and I can successfully boot to either Linux or Windows.

Oh, one last word. Why Windows XP instead of Windows Vista or Windows XP x64? Guess. Not all drivers are available and compatible. That makes it… right… not easy.