Things: Add NetNewsWire Headline

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.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# coding: utf-8

# Ian Haigh - thejoyofappscript.com

# Make a new To Do in Things, based on the name and URL of the currently
# selected item in NetNewsWire. The new To Do goes slap bang into the "Someday"
# category. Handy for temporary bookmarks for things that you want to check
# out later but aren't suitable for Instapaper, like video.

# Based on this script by Mike Hall:
# http://mph.puddingbowl.org/2010/07/creating-links-in-the-body-of-a-note-in-things/

TAGS = "nnw, watch"
# tags that get added to the new To Do

def create_to_do(name, source, link)
	if link == ""
		note = name
	else
		note = "[url=#{link}]#{name} - #{source}[/url]"
	end

	task = @things.make(:at => app.lists["Someday"].beginning, :new => :to_do, :with_properties => {
		:name => "#{source} – #{name}",
		:tag_names => TAGS,
		:notes => note,
	})
end

require 'rubygems'
require 'appscript'
include Appscript

nnw = app("NetNewsWire")
@things = app("Things")

name = nnw.selectedHeadline.title.get
link = nnw.selectedHeadline.URL.get
source = nnw.selectedHeadline.subscription.givenName.get

create_to_do(name, source, link)

#`growlnotify -p 1 -m "Added \"#{name}\" to things."`

# uncomment the previous line if you've got Growl installed
# and you want a pretty message to pop up.