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

You know, since I got my MacBook Pro last year, I’ve become a total Mac convert. I bought Neela a MacBook Pro. I bought a Mac Mini as my desktop, replacing a huge custom built PC tower. I even bought another Mac Mini for my entertainment center, to watch digital media.

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

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

Will the quest ever end? Will my life ever be simple? Probably not. But in the meantime I can keep accumulating tools and options to make life better.

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

Found this on Lifehacker. Send any of these document types (click on the flag for an english translation) to the email pdf {at} koolwire(.)com and Presto!, you get a PDF back in your email of your document.

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:

Technorati Tags: PDF, PDF Conversion