What It Is

It is a special folder that resides on your Desktop. When you drop or save files into it, a window pops up that allows you to tag and direct those files into a specific notebook with only a few keystrokes. Once the file has been sent to Evernote, the original is placed in the Trash.

Simple, eh?

Usage

I use this workflow primarily in two ways: Scanning paper documents with my ScanSnap — and as a “Virtual Hard Drive” to save items directly into Evernote.

The ScanSnap Series of Document Scanners are currently my favorite devices for ordinary people to scan in all of their paper documents. They’re easy, reliable, and fast! The included ScanSnap software can be set up to allow direct scanning to Evernote, but it leaves behind a copy of the original… which causes an accumulation of PDF files very quickly. By using this “Evernote Dropbox Folder”, I can keep my hard drive clear of unneeded copies once they’re in Evernote.

I can also use the folder as a place to save documents from any program quickly into Evernote. Getting a copy into Evernote is now just as simple as selecting “Save As…” and pointing the file into your automated Evernote folder.

In both cases, the included tagging and notebook selection window lets me organize things on the way into Evernote — which helps me to not be so lazy about keeping things tidy!

Caveats

• These instructions and screenshots below are for Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). It’s a little different when doing this with Leopard (OS X 10.5).
• Even with recent improvements from Apple in the way that Folder Actions work, the process can be triggered before all of your data is in the folder. If you’re scanning a large document or copying a file from a networked drive, I’d recommend saving it to your local computer in it’s entirety before dragging it into your Evernote dropbox folder.
• If you don’t already have an Evernote Premium account, this won’t magically allow you to save file types that aren’t a part of their free offering.

Installation

Here’s how to set things up, step-by-step:

1. Download and extract this ZIP file:
   
2. Copy the included Folder Action Script to the /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts directory on your Hard Drive
3. Create a Folder on your Desktop to serve as your “Evernote Dropbox”. Personally, I call mine “@EVERNOTE” — but you can call it whatever you like.
4. Activate the Folder Action by Control-Clicking on this folder (a.k.a., “Right Clicking”) and selecting “Folder Action Setup” from the “Services” menu:
   
5. Select the Evernote Script from the Folder Action Setup menu:
   

Fit and Finish

The Folder should be working at this point, but I like to do a couple of other things to make it a little more useful — and to remind me to use it!

First, I change the icon of the folder so it stands out on the Desktop. I’ve hacked together an icon for me and my clients — and I’ve included it in the ZIP file for your convenience.

1. To change your icon from the standard folder graphic, open the image file that I included in the ZIP file and open it with Preview. Press Command-A (⌘A) to select the whole image and then press Command-C (⌘C) to copy it to the Clipboard.
2. To change to the new image, highlight your new Evernote Desktop folder and select “Get Info” — either from the Finder Menu=>File Menu or by pressing Command-I (⌘I). A window will open with information about the folder… and at the top will be the graphic for the folder. Click on it and you’ll see a subtle blue highlighting around the image. This means that it’s ready for our new image.
   
3. Press Command-V (⌘V) to paste the image and — voila — you’ve got yourself a custom icon!
4. I also like to create a shortcut in the Finder Sidebar. To create it, just drag-and-drop the Folder into Finder’s “Places” to add a shortcut. Now whenever you are saving a document, you can quickly select Evernote as the location to save your file!

That’s it! Let me know how it works for you in the comments below… and if something seems broken, please submit your Bug Reports here!

Take One Minute to Keep This Site Going — Either With Your Comments or Contributions!

If you’re just joining us, here are Parts One and Two of the “Learn To Speak AppleScript” Series!

Familiar with that quote by Pablo Picasso “Good artists copy, great artists steal”?

Well… let’s just say this:
We’re going to make you into a Great AppleScript Artist with this lesson!

Who Says That There’s No Honor Among Thieves?

With painting, music, writing – it’s a tradition to acknowledge the people that came before you. After all, without their contributions, you’d still be twiddling your thumbs. The best artists may have big egos, but they know that they aren’t starting from scratch — and programming is no different.

Realize this — The very act of writing an AppleScript immediately makes you a part of the Mac Community. It is a deep well where you can draw from the wisdom and insights of its long-standing members, benefit from its strong tradition of mentoring newcomers, and also share **your** insights back with those creative, smart people — all over the world.

As we discussed in Part Two of “Learn To Speak AppleScript”, “good programming” is a by-product of good thinking. Your head and your ego need to be situated properly to think clearly and to do your best work. It’s no different that a batter stepping up to the plate, a singer stepping up to a microphone, etc. — you should do what you have to do in order to “settle in” before game time.

Here’s one thing that I’ve been doing before writing or programming lately: I re-read Liz Danzico’s post (a.k.a., @Bobulate) about “The Currency of Enthusiasm”. Her post is a reminder that I can encourage more good work in the world by just taking a moment to acknowledge it when I see it. (BTW — Nice job, Liz! )

And believe it or not, I can make the world a better place by using someone else’s code bits in my AppleScript.

The Art of The Steal

Picasso made a distinction between “copying” and “stealing” — “stealing” being the road to artistic greatness.

Is “stealing” just copying more? No.
It’s quite literally the act of taking something that belongs to someone else — and making it your own.

After all, chances are that if you’re facing a programming challenge (hell, if you’re facing any kind of challenge in life), some one else has been through it. Thankfully, programmers as a group tend to talk in great detail about the “code dragons” that they’ve slain — and they often publish the source code that they used to do it.

So I say find that code. Use it. And, ultimately, make it your own.

And that, my friends, is “The Art of the Steal” and an essential key to Learning to Speak AppleScript. Find those smart people who have generously shared their solution to your problem, use it not only to solve your immediate problems but also to learn, and then acknowledge that their good work was a help to you. If you can, find ways to improve their bits and make them your own — and share your contribution back with the community so that other people can benefit from it.

Take a penny. Leave a penny.

“Internet etiquette” isn’t some esoteric thing: If you do it correctly, you’ll learn how to be a better programmer, you’ll make new friends, and you’ll get to help people. Your enthusiasm will shine a light on the contributions of others — and encourage new people to add water to the collective well of ideas and not just drink it dry.

Do it wrong — and you’ll be a pariah.

On the Next Page — We Begin to Code!

Click Here To Read Part One of “Learn To Speak AppleScript”

To recap the end of Part One, your goal will be to build a script that will save your emails as text files. The actual programming will be covered in Part Three and, when we get there, I’ll try to stay more “conceptual”.

My goal will be to give you a feel for how an AppleScript does its job — but still include enough real-life code to keep it interesting for more experienced scripters (or for people who came here from a search engine looking for a bit of code to get their scripts up and running!)

But, if you are a beginner, don’t let those computer code snippets intimidate you! They are included primarily so that you can see what a real-life Script looks like and not with any expectation that you master the intricacies of the AppleScript language.

After all, this is really an exercise in teaching you the fundamentals of thinking and speaking AppleScript. In other words, this is going to be more like an English class in literature where we talk about books and what they mean — and not a grammar lesson.

In fact, that metaphor is actually a pretty good way to get started!

The First Step Is Between Your Ears

As I mentioned in Part One, AppleScript is an “English-like” programming language.

What we are going to do in this lesson is to state our goals as clearly as we can — and do so in plain, everyday language. Once we’ve done that, we’ll set about writing an AppleScript that matches up with that description.

Rule #1:
First, we say it in English…. then we say it in “English-like”.

Writing a good AppleScript is like…. (wait for it) …. writing a good anything!

Most things that are well-written have probably started from a place of being well-thought-out, right? That’s not to say that you won’t discover some fun, unexpected stuff along the way — but actions begin with intentions. My experience is this: The clearer you are about your intentions when you start, the more you’ll make the right choices along the way.¹

And the more likely you’ll end up with a working thing at the end of your journey.

The Goal of the Script (In Plain English)

First, we need to state our overall goal as clearly as we can. For this first sample script, that goal is:

“I want a script that will save emails as text files.”

The Basic Elements We’ll Need In the Script:

Now that we know what we want to do, we’ll flesh out the details more fully:

1. I use the Apple Mail application to read my emails.
2. I want to be able to save emails as text files.
3. I want to be able to save more than one email at a time.
4. I want to be able to control where the text files are saved to.
5. I want the new text files to have distinctive names so that I can tell them apart more easily.
6. I want the script to come up with those names so that I don’t have to do it for each file.

“I Four Years Old!”

You’ll notice how explicit I was in calling out each part of what I wanted to do.

This way of thinking in terms of “baby steps” towards your overall goal is probably the most important thing you can take from this lesson.

Here’s why — AppleScript is great, but teaching it to do what you want it to do can be like trying to teach a child. You really need to try and see things through the eyes of a kid (or, in this case, a computer that knows only what you tell it) in order to know how to communicate.

Rule #2:
AppleScript is like an energetic child. It’s eager to please — but in need of clear, constant direction.

It reminds me a bit of that old Bill Cosby comedy routine about a kid named Jeffery:

If you have any hope of getting off the plane with your sanity intact, you’re going to have to learn how to translate your adult language into something a kid can understand. That is to say, it’s something you’re absolutely going to be able to do — it’s just going to take a brief transition while you take a deep breath and mentally switch gears from your language and into theirs.

Sometimes, Kids Just Don’t Understand

I’ll make one more point using the “Talking To Kids Metaphor” as we end Part Two…

Every kid is different.
Some are barely able to tie their shoes.
Some come up to you and, unprompted, freak you out by asking if you’re an existentialist.

In the world of AppleScript, each of the applications on your Mac — programs like Apple Mail, Firefox, Evernote, iCal, etc. — are like kids at different grade levels. And, although you can sometimes guess, you’ll never really know which type of kid it is until you start talking to them and figure out their vocabulary level.

And this is the point where, thankfully, reality departs from the metaphor: In the computer world, you can actually see which words an application knows ahead of time — sparing you painful, Jeffery-like conversations. When it comes to speaking AppleScript, each program keeps a list of the vocabulary it knows in an AppleScript Dictionary. (Easy to remember, right?)

Ready To Talk?

In Part Three, we’ll open up that dictionary and start having an AppleScript conversation with a fairly “well-spoken” kid on the Application playground — Apple Mail!

1. I’d like to welcome everyone to the Veritrope.com “Den of Zen”…

Two Cool AppleScripts

I recently became aware of a project on the Broken City Lab website that used one of my AppleScripts as a reference: This post about Using AppleScript With Arduino, LCDs, and PHP documents Justin Langlois’s efforts to use AppleScript to drive an external hardware project. Not only do we share the same first name but, since his last name is the same as my Canadian grandfather’s, it has set me off on a wild theory about having a distant AppleScripting cousin north of the border.

And in another weird confluence, I discovered yet other AppleScripting Justin (how many of us are there, anyways?) — Justin Blanton. He recently served up this cool bit of code on his site: An AppleScript-driven “kitchen timer” that works with Launchbar. Some of his use-case examples are:

• Remembering to leave in 10 minutes to pick up the takeout order I just made.
• Remembering to get the coffee out of the french press in four minutes.
• Remembering to call someone back in 20 minutes.
• Remembering to take the pizza out of the oven in 15 minutes (when I’m not within earshot of the oven alarm).

Looks pretty handy…. well done!
(Via Broken City Lab and justinblanton.com )

MacHeist ~ Stay tuned…
After a brief delay, the latest MacHeist nanoBundle 2 is live and there’s lots of goodies to be had: MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout, Flow, RapidWeaver, and (after 50,000 bundles are sold) Tales of Monkey Island….All for $20! That’s over $240 off of the total list prices and, even better, 25% of your purchase goes to charity!
(Via www.macheist.com )

SCOTTEVEST – Travel Clothing
In case you’ve never heard of Scottevest, they’re the Idaho-based purveyors of tech-friendly Travelwear. During their 40% Off Sale last week, I picked up a couple of jackets (for an upcoming review and “Travel Tech” series) which arrived today. I thought I’d try the Quantum Jacket while running errands here in chilly NYC today and, I have to say, I’m impressed. Combined with my also-newly-purchased Tavo Gloves (which let you operate your iPhone without suffering frostbitten fingers), I was well-equipped to withstand a Category 5 Geek-alanche!¹ — or at least to win a few Nerd Merit Badges!
(Via www.scottevest.com )

Petition to make “Hella” the prefix for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – Boing Boing
C’mon — the California Academy of Science totally has to be behind this effort, right? (Wassup Kevin!)
(Via www.boingboing.net )

Schneier on Security: More on the Al-Mabhouh Assassination
Bruce Schneier is like a bearded, truth-seeking missile — here he is, deconstructing some recent events you may have heard about in Dubai:

The truth is that Mr. Mabhouh’s assassination was conducted according to the book — a military operation in which the environment is completely controlled by the assassins. At least 25 people are needed to carry off something like this. You need “eyes on” the target 24 hours a day to ensure that when the time comes he is alone. You need coverage of the police — assassinations go very wrong when the police stumble into the middle of one. You need coverage of the hotel security staff, the maids, the outside of the hotel. You even need people in back-up accommodations in the event the team needs a place to hide.

(Via www.schneier.com )

1. Yes, I realize that I am mixing a couple of weather-related things together in an awkward, unfortunate way

What Exactly is AppleScript?

AppleScript is an English-like language used to write programs that control applications on your computer. The “English-like” part is important — it means that you don’t need to have a computer science degree to use it.

Simply put, it’s programming for regular people who want to get things done faster.

The programs that you write in AppleScript are called “scripts” (you saw that coming, right?). Much like the script for a movie, an AppleScript is really just a list of instructions for your computer to follow. It’s kind of like saying to your Mac, “Okay — when I say this, you need to do X, Y, and Z.” Honestly, that’s all that scripting means… giving your Mac a To-Do list.

Best of all, it’s free! Apple generously includes several tools that you’ll need to get started with automating tasks on your Mac — including the AppleScript Editor, which is used to write and save new AppleScripts for your computer to follow.

What is AppleScript Good For?

If you’ve ever known the soul-sucking drudgery of having to perform the same tasks over-and-over again on your computer, then AppleScript is for you! AppleScript automates repetitive tasks for you. So, instead of wasting time doing everything by hand, your computer does it for you…

(This is, after all, what they are supposed to do in the first place. )

Need to change the names of 100 files? You can either spend the next hour clicking and typing yourself into carpal-tunnel-induced dementia¹ — or spend 2 minutes to write a script, click a button, and it’s done!

Most programs on the Mac have at least some level of support for AppleScript and, if you look around Veritrope.com, you’ll see AppleScripts that I’ve written to work with (and to connect together) many popular Mac applications. There are literally thousands of AppleScripts available to automate your system (most of them free!).

And, if by some chance you can’t find a script that someone else has written to automate a particular task, it really is easy enough to write one for yourself.

How do I learn AppleScript?

People often write me asking “How did you learn AppleScript?”

The simple answer is that I started reading AppleScripts written by people who knew what they were doing. The more that I read, the more I understood what was possible — and also some of the things you needed to make a working script.

In other words — Before I could really speak AppleScript, I started to learn how to **THINK** AppleScript. It’s really not any different than if you were dropped into a place where you didn’t know the language. You’d probably understand what the people around you were getting at — long before you learned enough of the language to make yourself understood.

How To Learn The Language

The quasi-official macosxautomation.com site is probably the best place to get started. It has lots of introductory tutorials and code examples for the beginning AppleScripter — but also some great introductions to other utilities that really set the Mac apart (like Automator and Services).

People like Ben Waldie (a guru of AppleScript and Mac Automation) — as well as any number of people who post on the MacScripter forum — also really helped me get going. I was truly inspired by their projects… and also by the community that they maintained to help new people like me get started.

As I started to really get more into it, I also found some great books about AppleScript (Especially Sal Soghoian’s “AppleScript 1-2-3″)

Learning How To Think

All of the resources that I just mentioned are the places to learn the actual ins-and-outs of programming in AppleScript… Honestly, you really can’t do much better than all of these great, talented teachers! Read what they have to say — and they’ll whip your scripting vocabulary and programming grammar into shape before you know it!

What I’d like to do here is a little different: I want to try and teach you how to think in AppleScript so that, while you’re learning from these great resources, you’ll have an existing framework for understanding what they’re trying to teach you. That way when it comes time to write your own scripts, you’ll hopefully have a stronger sense of what your looking for and, what’s more, the types of scripts you’ll need to put together to make it all work.

In Part Two of this series, we’re going to start to build our first sample script: An AppleScript that will save your emails as text files!

1. This is not a real condition…I hope!

Now There Are **TWO** Evernote-to-MacJournal AppleScripts…

There are now two Evernote-to-MacJournal Exporter scripts included in the downloadable ZIP archive: One that attempts to preserve the formatting of the Evernote item by importing it into MacJournal as a Read-Only Web Archive formatted file, and another that will create an Editable RTF file that may not retain as much of the original formatting and/or embedded images.

I wrote the original script to convert the HTML files that Evernote exports into a slightly different format called a “Web Archive” which bundles in all of the embedded images and information so that the note will look the same inside of MacJournal. The only problem is that MacJournal doesn’t edit that format (yet). Dan Schimpf (the developer behind MacJournal) and I have been trading some emails about it and he is looking into some options to enable Web Archive editing within MacJournal. Until then (or until I can figure out a better way of doing it), you’ll have to use two different scripts depending upon if you want to edit the contents of the note inside of MacJournal right away.

Macworld Reviews MacJournal 5

In his review for Macworld, William Porter gives MacJournal 5 a ranking of Four-And-A-Half Mice (Out Of Five).

MacHeist?

The teaser page for the MacHeist bundle is now live a few days before it goes on sale… and even though there’s been no official announcement, I couldn’t help but notice an icon on one of the boxes being loaded out of the truck!

Anyone who has been waiting to pick up a copy of MacJournal should get their credit cards ready!

After a very extended beta period, DEVONthink has finally “come out of its shell” today with the final release of its 2.0 edition. (Congratulations to Eric and the gang at DEVONtechnologies for finally getting rid of those yellow “Beta Stripes”!)

As part of their “virtual launch party”, DEVON is offering a 10% discount on the new edition for both new customers and upgraders — which I think is the least they can do for auto-playing a Rod Stewart song on the page.

Questionable music choices aside — I also noticed that Dan Byler, the author of the NetNewsWire-to-DEVONthink AppleScript, wrote a review of DEVONthink Pro on his blog which won him some swag. Nice work, Dan!

One more bit of good news — the final release seems to have fixed the problem that Beta 8 created with the Evernote-to-DEVONthink AppleScript. Anyone who had trouble with the script recently should download the new version of DEVONthink and try again!

“I have a rule in Mail, which moves specific emails to a specific email folder… Now I need an AppleScript to run in conjunction with the rule, which will save each email as a txt file in a folder on my desktop…. Can anyone suggest how I go about this?”

You remember that I whipped up an Export Apple Mail Messages to Text Files script just a few weeks ago that pretty much fits that description, right? So I thought that, in the process of turning it into something that Apple Mail can use, I could do a little walk-through for you guys of how to write a script like this in the first place!

Easy, right? A walk in the park.

HA! (And how does that Robert Burns poem go again?)

“Hmmph. That’s weird.”

After a short burst of hack-fu, I had a script that would work within Apple Mail…with one small caveat: When selecting the message and applying the rule manually, everything worked… But when a message arrived on my Exchange email account and triggered the script by a rule, it exported the content of the previous message to the resulting text file.

Hmmph. That’s weird. “I must have made a mistake somewhere…”, I said to myself.

But no matter what I tried, it always exported the wrong file! I called in the big guns for help with this post on the MacScripter website. Ben Waldie — a guru in AppleScript community and author of many excellent books about Automator– personally pitched in to try and sort this out…. sadly to no avail. (Thanks again, Ben!)

A quick search around reveals that this may not just be me: I saw this Comment Thread and also this post on stackoverflow.

Is this a wide-spread bug with Apple Mail, Exchange, and AppleScript? I’ve noticed a few other shall-we-say… anomalies with the way OS X works with Exchange — and I’m starting to wonder if this is another to add to the list.

Anyone else have the same issue? Please post in the comments below!

A description of what you’ve found out would be great (especially if it solves the problem) — but even a “Me too!” is helpful.

Well Scott — If there wasn’t one before, there is now!

Features

• This AppleScript will export any selected Messages or Notes in Apple Mail as individual text files to a temporary folder on your Desktop (called “Temp Export Folder”);
• The script also attempts to remove any “illegal characters” from the file name as to avoid the process grinding to a complete halt!
• If you have Growl installed, the script should detect it and notify you when your export is completed.

Current Limitations and Open Issues

(Otherwise known as “Places Where You Could Help Out!”)

• I kept the output very basic — only spitting out the content of the note/message as the content of the text file. It *IS* possible to add more information from the messages and, if people are interested in that, let me know!
• Errors that will undoubtedly arise when you do something that I didn’t think of or test for!

How to Install and Use

First, select the messages or notes in Apple Mail.

Then just run the script… either:

1. Manually;
2. By using Snow Leopard’s “Keyboard Shortcuts”, or;
3. By using FastScripts

Source Code and Download Link on the next page!