Crazy Apple News Site

In Last Chance To See Douglas Adams talks about writing a program that is very sexy and has pull down menus and everything, and it’s entire purpose is to figure out the volume of the nests made by a certain kind of bird. In an article called “Frank The Vandal” he writes about a desire to be able to take just the parts of programs you want and paste them into a workflow so that you can do whatever it is you want to do without using six different programs. This is a mindset that resonates with me. If I can spend a few happy minutes¹ writing pointless software to solve a problem now instead of seconds taking care of it manually once a week I will definitely go for the pointless software. It was in this vein that I tackled the following

Extremely Small Problem:

I do a lot of what Natalie Goldberg calls “practice writing”. which is where you just block out some time and keep writing for that entire time. This writing can be directed, or not, but the goal is to keep moving forward, to keep putting words on the page, or, in my case, into the text document. This isn’t “real” writing that you plan to put in front of other people some day, this is just exercise, to keep those writing muscles in shape.

When you exercise your muscles, you aren’t left with an artifact of your exercise. But when you do writing exercise, you have this document that you created, and have to do something with it. It’s possible that some part of it might be worth something to you in some context, so it seems wasteful to just delete it. Once again referring to Natalie Goldberg, these are like compost; they’re not really valuable by themselves, but if you keep piling them up there’s a chance that someday something good will grow out of them. Being the nerd that I am, I decided that I would keep all these useless little documents, and I would keep them all in one folder, so they would stay out the way.

So, on my home Mac I set up Hazel to just take those documents, rename them to today’s date (which gives me a good record of which days I did my writing practice and which days I didn’t) and shove them in a folder. All of this happens without me thinking about it, because Hazel is awesome. So, here comes the extremely small problem:

Sometimes I do my writing practice on my laptop, which is a PC.

Because I’m insane and picky and whatnot I use FocusWriter on the PC² and FocusWriter, by default, produces Rich Text files (rtf files). BUT I have WriteRoom set to produce plain text files (txt files). It’s possible that I could just set FocusWriter to save things as txt files by default, but that’s crazy talk. Simple solutions need not apply, thank you very much. And I still have the problem of getting my little documents³ from my PC to my mac, and in the right folder.

Now, I grant you, I could move these files myself, but part of being who I am is having a rock-solid conviction that I shouldn’t be thinking about things if I can make a computer think about them for me. My ultimate goal is to be able to write something mindlessly and forget about it, secure in the knowledge that when I look for it⁴ it’ll be where I expect it to be.

After a little bit of thinking and a little more tinkering, I came up with the following

Gloriously Baroque Solution:

The moving parts involved here are (in order):

1. Dropbox
2. Hazel
3. Automator
4. Word 2011 for Mac
5. Hazel again

Here’s how it goes:

I write my useless document, and save it to a particular folder in my Dropbox. It’s instantly beamed to all the other computers that are connected to my Dropbox account.

On my mac, Hazel is monitoring that folder, and sees a new rtf file show up. It starts a rule⁵ that renames the file and moves it into my “compost” folder. But the file is still an rtf instead of a txt file! Not to worry, this is where it calls Automator.

I’ve created an Automator workflow that takes the file, loads it into Word, converts it into a txt file and saves it.⁶  It then hands control back to Hazel. The Hazel rule completes, and colors the label of the original rtf file gray. This triggers a second Hazel rule that is watching the compost folder. This rule does one thing: if it finds an rtf file with a gray label it puts it in the trash. Since these files are only turned gray after the txt version is created I’m no longer worried about keeping the rtf file around.

This all works perfectly, much to my surprise, and (even more surprisingly) usually takes less than five seconds to run, even with all the Word opening and closing stuff. And since it’s happening while I’m not at my mac it’s effectively happening instantly.

Conclusion

Well, there isn’t one, really. All in all this took me about 20 minutes to set up, and will save me a few seconds of work a few times a week. But it’s work that I’m unlikely to do by myself, which would compromise the integrity of my compost folder. So, here’s to creative solutions to minuscule problems!

1. or hours [↩]
2. it most closely matches the functionality of WriteRoom, which is what I use on my mac [↩]
3. which, you’ll remember, are pretty much worthless [↩]
4. which may nor may not ever happen, but that’s beside the point [↩]
5. Hazel’s name for a set of actions that happen when a certain condition is met [↩]
6. and then closes Word. I don’t know why this is a separate step, but it is. [↩]

2010 has been a big year for those of us who write things about Apple Products. It’s been a busy year for Apple, with a groundbreaking new product, a fiasco-riddled update to an existing product, and millions upon millions of new dollars flowing into their coffers. Join me as we look at some of the events of 2010 through the lens of hindsight and minimal research. As usual, we start with

January

Most of January was spent rampantly speculating about what Apple would be announcing at their Big Reveal event on the 27th. As it became more and more certain that some sort of Tablet was in the works the Mythical Apple Tablet became the focus of everyone’s imagination. Feature lists sprang up like Peashooters in Plants vs. Zombies¹ and everyone was, well, kinda disappointed when the device that was actually revealed turned out to be a very intelligently designed, sensible device at a surprisingly low price. However, once the iPad was announced we of the Apple press were left facing the question of what we should write about in

February

With the iPad announced but not released, we had a lot of time to try and figure out what, if anything, was coming next. Apple itself seemed to be entirely focused on getting the iPad right, and we didn’t even get any good rumors during the shortest and bleakest month. Nate went to California, and subsequently failed to write anything interesting about the trip, as his computer committed suicide every time he tried to work up a post. I’ll say this: it was very warm. Which sounds nice right now. December in SLC is bitter, bitter. But things warmed up in

March

With the announcement that Steam would be coming to the Mac. People wondered why it was that Apple let Valve beat them to the online software distribution punch. In other Apple news, the iPad still wasn’t released, and people continued the “big iPod Touch” jokes, and the “pad sounds like a feminine hygiene product” jokes, neither of which were funny.

In CANS news, “Q” spent March standing in line to buy an iPad, which was finally released in

April

The month of the iPad! It was finally here! It was real! Everyone wanted one! Little kids hugged them! It was like Christmas! The dang things were actually really good! There’s really nothing bad to say about the iPad launch. It went off well and the iPad was and is an amazing device. And it’s good that iPad news was so positive, because April is also the month of the iPhone 4 fiasco.

It’s old news, but still irritating. Gizmodo bought a prototype iPhone 4 from a guy who picked it up in a bar when someone left it there…you know the song. Anyway, this happened in April, and like any terrible news story, was still making waves in

May

We decided to spend May entirely inwardly focused, as “Q” was still weak from his exposure to the elements and we really hated all the negativity about the iPhone 4. We had our own run-in with negativity on our other blog when we thoughtlessly said some rude things about Roger Ebert. But out in Apple-world the iPhone 4 storm swirled on into

June

When the iPhone 4 was actually really announced to a not-very-surprised world. The Retina display is and

Little. Aluminum. Different.

was an amazing idea, and this was before we knew the antennae on the device were flawed. The new Mac Mini was announced and Steve Jobs posted some thoughts about Flash. Adobe responded with typical aplomb, by which I mean various Adobe personnel told Apple where they could stick their magical devices. But, the Mac Mini, that was and is a thing of wonder. Or at least it’s really tiny and beautiful. But beauty isn’t everything, and in

July

We learned that form has to follow function as the iPhone 4 was officially launched and people discovered that wrapping their hands around the thing in certain ways reduced your signal strength. We here at CANS tried to ignore this whole mess then, and we continue to do so now. In July we heard from the future, the past, and an alternate reality, all to avoid “Antennagate” and it’s repercussions. Fortunately Apple announced a new battery charger at the end of July, so the month wasn’t a total loss. And speaking of loss, in

August

Apple lost their most interestingly named executive, Mr. Papermaster. We here at CANS felt the loss keenly, as we hadn’t made nearly enough jokes based on that name. I mean, look at it. Papermaster. Papermaster. It’s just too good. But he’s gone and there’s nothing we can do about it. So we’re back to jokes about Phil Schiller. Ah well. Anyway, August segued right into

September

with the announcement of a big music event at which Apple announced all kinds of new iPods. the new iPod Touch should really be called the iPad Mini, and the new Nano should be called the iPod Shuffle Touch. An updated Apple TV was announced, and people still seem to feel that it’s got a long way to go before it reaches its full potential. And in

October

We were told that the potential for a new version of OSX was about to become a reality. Well, actually, Lion isn’t due to ship until “Summer 2011″, but we got a sneak peek at what Apple’s working on. The “Back to the Mac” theme that they chose for the announcement event was, it turned out, more meaningful than we expected, as many UI decisions and idioms from the iPad are being brought back to the Mac, from which, Apple was quick to remind us, iOS originally came. Chief amongst these is a Mac App Store, which will let you buy your Mac Apps without going to real stores or the actual internet or anything. the App Store is set to launch in just a few days, well ahead of the rest of the Lion package. Seemingly designed specifically for Lion, Apple also released the new MacBook Air, which is so small it’s practically an iPad itself. Whether people will buy into it or not is anyone’s guess. Then it was

November ²

The month were I wrote a book, as I am wont to do. But even so, Apple wasn’t content to rest on their laurels. No, they finally put the axe to the XServe and buried the hatchet with Apple Corps. For the first time ever, it became possible to buy Beatles music on iTunes. Someday I might actually do so. But don’t hold your breath. And indeed, we were all breathing fairly easily heading into

December

Where Apple announced the early launch of the App Store, which won’t happen until next month. Many, many people got iPads as holiday presents, which of course means that it’s time to start speculating about the iPad 2′s specs and pricing.

And that’s 2010 in a nutshell. What will 2011 hold? Will the App Store for Mac take off like a rocket to the moon or fizzle out like that Ping thing that’s built into iTunes 10? Will Lion be everything we were hoping for and more? Will Penny and Leonard get back together, or are they going to pull a Ross and Rachael right up until the final episode of The Big Bang Theory?³ We can but wait and see. And speculate wildly, of course. But that’s the subject for another post. Here’s to the year that was.

1. which was also quite popular at the time [↩]
2. Look, you try coming up with 12 really good segues [↩]
3. The parallels between Friends and TBBT are striking. It’s almost as if the producers of TBBT realized that they had a good ensemble sitcom on their hands and decided to do some research into how those work out… [↩]

The FCC, CIA, and FDA have started a joint investigation into the design of Apple’s latest update to the Mac Mini.
“We are concerned that the elegance and beauty of the new Mac Mini will influence the way people watch TV, as it will almost invariably be added to entertainment centers around the world.” said an FCC representative. “I mean, that thing can store every episode of LOST in HD, which is bad for reruns.”

“We are worried that the new unibody enclosure of the Mac Mini will affect people much like a drug, forcing people to buy more and more Minis until they can buy nothing else,” wrote the FDA. “We haven’t stopped thinking about it since it was announced.”

“We jumped in because there’s not a whole lot to do these days, what with the FBI taking over pretty much all of our work,” Said the CIA¹ .

Here at CANS we are trying to save up enough pennies to conduct our own research into the effects of the new Mac Mini’s HDMI port on our 23″ monitor that is currently connected to a loathsome Dell laptop. We estimate we will have the required number of pennies (70,000) by the middle of 2014.

1. At least, that’s what they want you to think… [↩]