A while back I created an Entourage script to create tasks from email messages in Remember the Milk. Well, I finally got around to improving it.

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

If you have off-site/hosted storage needs and haven’t looked at Amazon S3, you really should.

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:

jets3t Initial Rating:

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

File this under incredibly useful. This is a FF/Safari/Greasemonkey script to show the keyboard shortcuts on the Remember the Milk site.

Link

Technorati Tags: keyboard shortcuts, Remember the Milk, shortcuts