Posting articles with Tweetie from within NetNewswire

When i first bought a Mac, about 4 years ago, I loved NetNewsWire. Then, when Twitter grew bigger, but was still about information sharing I moved to Twitteriffic and RSS sort of became less important to me. But as Twitter lost in information sharing activity - at least with respect to the info i'm interested in - and gained in chit-chat, i moved back to RSS, using Google Reader.

Honestly, i believe that Google Reader is a great product, but the imposed work-flow is not quite what suits me. And being an Mac user, the aesthatics felt … uncomfortable. Bottom line, after trying just about all other RSS readers for the Mac, I moved back to NetNewsWire. Also, i have since moved to Tweetie rather than Twitteriffic as it just feels more intuitive to me. But … NetNewsWire doesn't allow me to post using Tweetie. As a result i found myself copy and pasting a lot in order to share interesting articles via Twitter.

After searching for a solution, and complaining via Twitter, I found this website which listed a lot of AppleScripts that can be used from within NetNewsWire. Being the nerd that I am i decided to attempt to create one that would let me post directly through Tweetie. While i was at it, i decided to do url shortening in the script as well, to reduce the required number of clicks inside the tweetie compose window. Anyway, here's what i came up with:

tell application "NetNewsWire"
	if index of selected tab = 0 then
		set s to URL of selectedHeadline
		set t to title of selectedHeadline
	else
		set i to index of selected tab
		set i to i + 1
		set URL_list to URLs of tabs
		set s to item i of URL_list
		set Title_list to titles of tabs
		set t to item i of Title_list
	end if
	
	set s to "http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=" & s
	set shortUrl to (do shell script "curl --url \"" & s & "\"")
end tell

tell application "System Events"
	open location "tweetie:" & t & " (" & shortUrl & ")"
end tell

To install, just download the file and save it in the following folder: ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Scripts (where ~/ is the root of your user folder)

Just for the record, i can not claim to have came up with all code myself, as i am in no way an AppleScript expert. Perhaps the code could be improved upon, if so, let me know! For now, enjoy the script and use it at your own risk.

Better Post with Tweetie.scpt (4.60 kb)

TIP: Faster VMWare on OSX

Since using OSX and VMWare Fusion I've been looking for ways to improve performance. Using my MBP with 4GB of RAM is not at all a bad thing ;-), but when developing in Visual Studio (especially 2008) under Windows (especially Vista) within a virtual machine, I did experience glitches in performance. Using Activity Monitor on OSX I figured out that, what was causing the glitches, was disk activity. The MBP sports a 7200rpm drive, but it still is the bottleneck.

Now for the tip: Use an external drive (the fastest one you can get, i use a LaCie 1TB 7200rpm USB2 drive) to store your VM's.

Running a VM from a different drive dramatically boosts performance of the VM, as OSX's drive intensive virtual memory management won't conflict with Windows'. 

Currently i use the afore mentioned LaCie drive, but as it consists of 2 (noisy) 3.5" drives, I think I need to invest in (quite) a fast 1.8" or 2.5" external drive.

PS. Do upgrade to the latest version of VMWare fusion! Version 2.0.1 solves the often seen memory corruption and finally works well with Vista x64!

Using Google Apps with OSX and an iPhone

I'm not someone who likes promoting products that is not Open Source or at least free, but since using SpanningSync - costing a mere $25,00 a year - I'm really enthousiastic about the product. It just works and is invisibe ...

My scenario is somewhat different than that of most other iPhone users. I own 2 SIM cards, 1 Dutch with unlimited data traffic and 1 Italian prepaid without 3G options. As i currently live in Italy, using the Dutch SIM to access the internet would be costly, so I'm restricted to using WIFI whenever and wherever i can. Not being constantly online with my iPhone makes syncing the iPhone with Google Apps hard. I've tried the free NuevaSync, but i've noticed that i forget syncing regularly.

Using SpanningSync is transparent. It installs on OSX, syncs iCal with Google Calendar and Address Book with your Google contacts so that i can sync with my iPhone via iTunes. This way, when syncing my podcasts, music etc. i automatically sync my iPhones calendar and address book to 2-way with Google Apps. Having GMail configured on the iPhone as well, makes working with Google Apps a seemless experience.

As a bonus-tip that will further improve your Google Apps experience on OSX: Install Google Notifier for Mac and Reader Notifier and you're good to go!