I've been meaning to look into AppleScript for some time now, but I never had a reason to. This past week, I finally motivated myself to do so, since I had a goal in mind.
When I was reading my RSS feeds using Google Reader, I would star an item that I wanted to read later instead of right then. Once I had some time, I would go to my Starred Items and then read through them, or act on them as appropriate.
I have a similar process for Mail - if I wanted to remember a message for later, I would flag it and then go through the Flagged Items folder as necessary.
Once I started using Twitter, things got a bit more complicated. I finally settled on using Twitterrific as my Twitter client. While I does have built-in support for adding Favorites (which I would treat like Starred items in Google Reader), it has no way of listing my Favorite Tweets. This requires me to remember to go to the Twitter website, and then go to my Favorite Tweets section. Not the easiest thing to do in the world.
I realized that there must be a better way to handle this, since it was easy for me to forget that I had Favorite Tweets that I needed to go through. Since Twitterrific has an AppleScript dictionary, I wondered if I would be able to pull out the contents of the current Tweet and store that somewhere else on my computer where I would be more likely to remember to go through the tweets there.
OmniFocus seemed like the most logical place to put this information, since I keep the rest of my to do items there as well (with the added bonus of getting them automatically synced onto my iPod touch, as well). Since OmniFocus also has an extensive AppleScript dictionary, this approached seemed to have promise.
This then lead me to thinking about how to move my other to do/follow up items into OmniFocus as well. Mail shouldn't be a problem, but Google Reader would be another matter entirely. Since I use Firefox as my web browser (which doesn't much at all in the way of an AppleScript dictionary) this could be problematic. However, I've been thinking of switching back to Safari for a few weeks now, so this might just be enough to push me over the edge.
I have never done anything with AppleScript before (aside from copying some code into Script Editor and saving it), so this should be quite the learning experience for me. To help others out in the same situation, I am going to post the scripts that I came up for to pull follow up items from Twitterrific, Safari, and NetNewsWire into OmniFocus so that all of my information will be in one centralized location.
I hope that you will enjoy this series as posts as much as I had fun making them. :)
