One cool trick in 2.6.1 is the way FastScripts behaves when your scripts include “keystroke” commands to synthesize keyboard presses. In the past, these scripts were tricky to get right in FastScripts, because the synthesized keystroke would be mixed up with the very keys you had used to invoke the script. Now, FastScripts will suspend execution of any such script until you release the keys that were pressed to invoke the script.

FastScripts 2.6.1 Changes

• Prevent conflicts with synthesized keystroke commands and keyboard shortcuts
• Fix for situations where FastScripts became the front app after running a script
• Fix the built in on-screen display windows to grow in height to fit displayed message
• Restore support for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5

Unfortunately, this update is not available on the Mac App Store. Apple has now rejected it twice, citing the behavior of the app when it is used to run one of Apple’s own bundled scripts:

/Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts/Create New Message.scpt

This script is terrible to start with, but starting in OS X Lion, it simply doesn’t work. It fails with cryptic errors, and FastScripts faithfully reports them. Apple is rejecting FastScripts for the behavior of a faulty script that is bundled with OS X Lion.

The review process for App Store submissions is frustrating to start with: every release takes extra time and there is a great deal of uncertainty as to when an update will finally be made available to customers. I have to admit that sometimes the review team identifies serious bugs that I am glad to have fixed before releasing an app. But the benefit of that kind of review seems to be balanced by reviews like this one, where Apple’s own bugs are being cited as the cause for rejection my app.

I am confident that FastScripts 2.6.1 will eventually be approved for the App Store. In the mean time, any customer who owns the App Store edition can download and run the direct-sale version from my site.

• 64-bit compatibility for optimal performance on modern Macs
• Add support for FKeys F17-F19, available on many modern Mac keyboards.
• Fix a bug where deleted folders remain visible in menu
• Fix an issue with case-change-only name changes causing duplicate menu items

Enjoy the update, and “keep on scriptin’!”

The way I use Twitter is to leave one of these client applications running in the background, with all the notification settings set to off. I still check it quite often, but it’s on my terms. If I get deep into concentration working on some bug, chatting with a friend, or or watching a video, I don’t want Twitter interrupting me.

Twitterrific was the first desktop client I used, and I can’t remember whether it was the default choice or if I picked it, but I got in the habit of using the global keyboard shortcut Cmd-Ctrl-T to toggle the window’s visibility. When I tried other Twitter apps, I made a point of setting the preference in that app to match the same shortcut.

Eventually I tried an app that didn’t support a setting for a global keyboard shortcut, so I had to write a script to do it for me. It occurred to me at some point that I could write a single AppleScript to handle the toggling of visibility regardless of which app I was using.

Download “Toggle Twitter”

The script logic is pretty simple: given a list of common Twitter app-names, is one of them running? If so, toggle it. If not, launch it. If you’re using something else, just add it to the list, and it should work perfectly.

I used FastScripts to hook this up to the global shortcut Cmd-Ctrl-T because it matches my historic muscle memory, and well, T is for Twitter.

Marco provides a handy bookmarklet that you can add to your browser’s button bar, so when you find something cool you just click “Read Later” and it gets added to your Instapaper collection. This is handy, and if you’re using a browser like Safari, these bookmark bar items even get mapped to default keyboard shortcuts based on their position, e.g. Cmd-1, Cmd-2, etc.

My news reader of choice, NetNewsWire, also supports Instapaper, allowing me to easily add any news item’s underlying content to my “Read Later” list. In NetNewsWire, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-P (for paper!), and I’ve gotten hard wired to punting stuff to my reading list with a quick flick of the keys.

For months I’ve thought it would be nice if I had the same workflow in Safari and in NetNewsWire: see something, want to read it, don’t have time, press Ctrl-P. I don’t know why I took so long to sit down and spend the 5 minutes it took to write an AppleScript wrapper for Marco’s bookmarklet, and install it in my scripts folder to invoke with FastScripts.

If you want to be cool like me:

1. Download and install FastScripts. Free for up to 10 shortcuts!
2. From the FastScripts menu-bar icon, select FastScripts -> Create Safari Scripts Folder.
3. Download this script, and move it to the Safari-specific scripts folder: [Home] -> Library -> Scripts -> Applications -> Safari
4. Switch to Safari.
5. While holding the Cmd key, select “Read Later” from the FastScripts menu.
6. Assign a keyboard shortcut of your choice. (Ctrl-P for NNW-likeness).

Now whenever you see a cool page in Safari, just press Ctrl-P to instantly tag it for later reading.

Update: David Kendal observes on Twitter that you can assign custom keyboard shortcuts to bookmarks in Safari by simply using the System Preferences Keyboard Shortcuts and assigning to the correctly named bookmark. I was not aware that this would work with bookmarks! Very cool. It diminishes the necessity of the above workflow considerably, though I was pleased to be able to take “Read Later” out of my bookmarks bar. Another downside to the System Preferences route? Apparently the keyboard shortcuts will never take effect until you’ve shown the menu that they appear in at least once per Safari-launch.

Georg C. Brückmann chimed in with a semi-solution, which is a URL template you can use to jump directly to a PayPal transaction by ID. Take the root PayPal URL for your country, and add “vst/id=” followed by the PayPal transaction ID. In the United States, this leads to a URL like: https://www.paypal.com/vst/id=1234.

It’s sad to say that remembering a static PayPal URL and pasting in the transaction ID in the magic location is indeed easier than navigating PayPal’s slow and awkward transaction history UI. But it could be even easier with a little automation.

Jump To PayPal Transaction ID is a simple AppleScript that prompts you for a transaction ID, constructs the desired URL, and opens it in your default browser. If you don’t live in the United States, open the script in AppleScript Editor and alter the template URL contained within it.

I put this in my Safari-specific scripts folder:

[Home] | Library | Scripts | Applications | Safari

So it’s available from FastScripts whenever I’m in Safari. Problem solved.

If you’re not familiar with Google Quick Search Box, it’s basically a Quicksilver-style launcher, which can open all manner of documents and also do Google searches for whatever you’re typing, all at once. With the addition of Martin’s FastScripts plugin, it also magically gains the ability to directly run FastScripts scripts.

So if I bring up the quick search box and start typing the name of one of my scripts, it shows up instantly:

Significantly, this is more meaningful than simply knowing about where the scripts are located, and running them. Martin mentioned to me that he was taking advantage of my “API” for accessing and running the scripts. Huh? What? I don’t have an API, do I? Oh yes, but of course! AppleScript itself! Martin used the fact that FastScripts exposes AppleScript access to its library of scripts, and for executing those scripts in the context of FastScripts. So when you select and run a script from the GQSB, it runs exactly as it would if you selected it from the FastScripts menu itself.

A clever piece of work by Martin that takes unexpected advantage of these hooks I put into FastScripts. If you use both FastScripts and GQSB, you might want to check his project out!

• Now supports running plain-text .applescript files
• The FastScripts menu icon can now be changed to a custom color
• Alter appearance of menu so it doesn’t have rounded top corners on 10.6
• Bug Fixes
  • Fix glitches with “Smart Switching” on Snow Leopard 10.6
  • Fix processing of shell script arguments embedded in the “shebang” line
  • Fix a possible crash when changing mouse cursor while selecting from menu
  • Fix proper display of filenames e.g. when they contain slashes

I struggled with the question of whether to allow for colorizing of the menu bar icon. I think personally that all icons in the menu bar should be monochrome and approximately black. But the chorus of feedback from people with legitimate accessibility concerns prompted me to give in and provide a preference to set the color of the icon to any color you like. Yes, you can now make FastScripts hideously ugly, with a simple preference change!

Most of the other changes should be obvious from the outline what they imply. The “smart switching” fix will be a welcome change for anybody who started noticing on 10.6 that FastScripts would no longer always become active to make sure a dialog is presented in front of all other windows. I think I’ve come up with a solution that will now withstand the test of time. Special thanks to Mike Ash for a giving me a very helpful clue for solving this issue.

The biggest change from a development point of view is one of the most subtle to the user. Here is the FastScripts 2.5 menu:

And here is the old FastScripts 2.4 one:

The rounded corners in the old version weren’t too terrible, but there was clearly something wrong. Small blemishes such as this are like a dent in the side of a used car. Is it the only thing wrong with the car, or does it reflect an owner who has not taken care of it, inside or out? Now the FastScripts menu projects solidity and reliability, reflecting its core functionality. Thanks to Nicholas Riley for pointing out this issue and inspiring me to finally fix it. He also reported the issue with script names not being displayed correctly.

An interesting developer side-note: the explanation for the rounded corners are that up until FastScripts 2.5, the menu was entirely Carbon-based. So what you are seeing is a Carbon “pop-up menu” cleverly positioned so that it shows up exactly in the spot where a real menu would appear if I were using one!

When I first developed FastScripts, Cocoa’s menus were not sophisticated enough to handle all of the functionality I needed. So I used Carbon menus inside what is otherwise a Cocoa app. Fortunately I had the foresight to develop NSMenu and NSMenuItem style wrappers for the Carbon menus. Now that Cocoa menus are suitable for my needs, I was able to essentially remove the wrappers and write directly to the Cocoa menus API for a more integrated look (and less code to maintain, down the road!).

I store most of my iTunes tracks in Apple’s AAC encoding format, but from time to time I find it useful to convert some tracks in my library to MP3 format. While AAC is convenient and works on my iPod, iPhone, etc., I have to concede that MP3 format is a little more universal.

In the iTunes “Advanced” menu you’ll find a convenient conversion item, which lets you convert the encoding of a selected song file to whatever your default import encoding is. The problem is, since I’m always importing as AAC, the only option it gives me is to convert to AAC:

To use iTunes to convert a song to MP3 format, I would have to open up Preferences, click the Import Settings button, and change my default encoding choice to the MP3 encoder. Then I would have to close preferences, do the conversion, and then preferences and switch my encoding choice back to AAC.

YUCK!

AppleScript to the rescue. Because iTunes exposes an attribute “current encoder”, and because AppleScript exposes a command “convert”, I can do all the mucking about behind the scenes in a quick-running script that performs theses steps:

1. Save the current encoding setting.
2. Switch to the MP3 encoder.
3. Convert the selected songs.
4. Set the encoder back to whatever it was

Download the Convert to MP3 script. Install it in [Home] -> Library -> Scripts -> Applications -> iTunes. It will show up in FastScript’s iTunes-specific section, where you can assign a keyboard shortcut if you like.

Now when I want to convert songs to MP3 format, I just select them in iTunes, and press the keyboard shortcut I assigned to the script in FastScripts:

The conversion happens immediately and my encoding preference is not disturbed.

I use iTunes all the time, but it hadn’t occurred to me how annoying this is. You’ve been fishing around in the iTunes store, or the Podcasts source, or Audiobooks, or any of the numerous other zones of the application. Then, you get the crazy notion to actually use iTunes to listen to music, so you jump to the search box and start searching. Bah! It’s not searching my music, it’s searching the App Store, or whatever. Now you have to go click the “Music” icon, and start your search again.

So yes, it would be handy to have a convenient shortcut to switch back to the Music source, and that is where my scripting utility FastScripts is particularly potent. It was a little tricky to deduce which magic scripting command would achieve the goal, but I think I figured it out:

tell application "iTunes"
	set view of (browser window 1) to user playlist 1
end tell

Save this as a script file in your home directory:

[Home] -> Library -> Scripts -> Applications -> iTunes

This is an “Application-specific” scripts folder for iTunes, meaning it will only show up when the iTunes application is actually active and frontmost. Now you can open up FastScripts (free for up to 10 shortcuts) and use it to assign a keyboard shortcut:

Now when I’m browsing iTunes, I just press cmd-option-M and it jumps instantly to my music!

I have a bunch of iTunes scripts that I find useful. Over the next few days I’ll be highlighting other convenient tricks I use to make iTunes a more useful application through its scriptability.

Use FastScripts for free, for as long as you like. All features are enabled and you may define up to 10 keyboard shortcuts. If you decide you want unlimited keyboard shortcuts, purchase a license to remove that limitation.

I have been thinking for some time of eliminating FastScripts Lite. Customers found it confusing to differentiate between the versions, and I found it tedious to artificially maintain two versions. With the new, liberal evaluation terms in FastScripts 2.4, all of the old Lite functionality and much more is now included for free in the full version.

This new version also includes a software update mechanism so you can be sure to stay up to date with new releases as I update the application. So whether you’re an existing paid user, or a Lite user, be sure to download this release!

If you’ve been thinking of giving FastScripts a try, now is a great time to give it a spin. I hope you will enjoy what it has to offer!