A reader named Tony left a comment on my Duplicating Safari browsing sessions post, recommending that I try out appscript for my AppleScript bridging needs. I frequently use system calls to osascript to do this, and I’ve shied away from scripting bridges in the past because they make things much harder to share and distribute. I thought I’d give it a try, though.

I like it. I like it a lot. It’s frustrating that I can’t just hand you this script without a list of requirements and dependencies, but I’m going share it anyway, just to show off some of the appscript’s capabilities.

What I built was a CLI for OmniFocus. I had an AppleScript/Ruby monstrosity that actually worked with TaskPaper, The Hit List, Things and OmniFocus, but that one got out of hand. I took the good parts of it, concentrated on OmniFocus and converted it to appscript in short time. The result is OTask.

OmniFocus Essential Training

Omnifocus Scripts

Welcome to another post in our ongoing series of real-life customer stories, which are kind of like case studies only hopefully a little less prone to making the claim that our "innovative solutions" are improving anyone's "bottom line". Let it be known that we here at Omni feel it's inappropriate to monkey with your bottom line.

Today we're talking about OmniFocus, and how Mr. Tim Metz, managing director of Yourzine China, makes good use of it. Tim writes,

OmniFocus: Pro tip: Use URL's in Notes field to create links to your Perspectives: http://tinyurl.com/ye3gnl8

Though I have been hard-core enthusiast and sometime black belt of GTD since around the age of 20 (i.e., nearly a decade), I’ll admit to having had a certain initial reluctance and skepticism about OmniFocus. Perhaps this was due to the seeming eternity the notional app spent as vaporware, but I think it was mainly my bafflement at first opening the program shortly after its beta release. In its tiny default font and weird spacing, it presented the user with an empty list and almost no guidance on what the program does or how to use its amazingly complicated array of options for every conceivable combination and permutation of projects, lists, children, parents, siblings, start dates, dependencies, etc. I futzed with for a few minutes, realized I didn’t have a full week to spend learning a piece of software that seemed to make a simple task more complex and didn’t allow me to sync my data across computers, and I gave up.

I like to hack. Occasionally I produce the odd bit of code that might be useful to others. Here are some of the fruits of that. Share and enjoy!

I’m also starting to share the source code to some of my software on github. Head over there to take a look.