While hacking my way through the RSS jungle in NetNewsWire, I often find something interesting that I don’t have time to look at right now. Instapaper takes care of long form articles, but if the media in question is a little richer – a video of a skateboarding dog, say – you’ll need another way to come back to it.
This script (which is based on this one by Mike Hall) creates a new To Do in Things based on the currently selected headline, gives it a couple of tags to make it easy to find again, and embeds the URL in the notes section. So you can save up all your Internetistractions (and yes, that is a clumsy neologism/portmanteau of my own creation) and consume them when you’re not supposed to be working.
Download Add to Things.rb.zip
The source code is hastily finishing its breakfast and pulling on its gumboots, just south of here.
Web designers, in particular, are famous for making Photoshop files with 134 layers, all named “Layer 2 copy copy copy copy”, and spending an hour turning them on and off to show you one iteration of their handiwork. Using Photoshop and not using layer comps is akin to chartering a Gulfstream jet – and then taxiing to your destination. 
This has actually been added as a command in the latest release of InDesign (curse you Adobe, for improving your software and rendering my scripts obsolete). It still serves as a useful example for how to filter a bunch of objects based on a selector.
This script, erm, duplicates the functionality of simply looking at the bottom of the iTunes window, where you’ll find the total size of the current playlist smugly peering up at you. So why did I write this? Your guess is as good as mine. However, in the name of providing examples for would-be iTunes scripters, I present it here in all its redundant glory.
The clue is in the title. This is especially handy when you attach a keyboard shortcut with a utility such as – the frankly indispensable –
Things: Procrastinate
As is often the case with application scripting, a large part of the challenge is wrapping your head around the app’s unique nomenclature – every program has its own cat-skinning inclination. I spent some time trying to “move” the selected items to the “scheduled” list, to no avail. However, thanks to the excellent AppleScript documentation provided by Cultured Code (available here), I eventually figured out that they had a special verb for me: schedule.
As usual, my preferred way of running all these scripts is with Red Sweater Software’s FastScripts, and attaching a dynamic, attractive keyboard shortcut to ‘em (historians may note that for this particular script I have chosen control-right arrow. My mnemonic: get away from me).
The source code is dozing amongst those fern fronds, just over there.
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