tin-men

web development. mac. assorted nerdity.

Replyr

Hmm, I wonder what it is...Firstly, I’d like to say this wasn’t my idea. Mat came up with the initial idea, and did most of the leg work (and came up with that oh so trendy name ;) ). I just provided the applescript that made it work.

Right, now I’ve absolved myself of all responsibility, time for business. On Flickr there’s no way to directly reply to a comment, so the general practise is to show who you are replying to by putting “@username:” before your comment.

What Replyr does is get a list of all usernames on the page currently active in Safari - no other browsers are supported since this uses Automator (usually the people that have commented before you, but there are some odd cases where it pulls other user names. I might fix it in a later release). It then shows you a pop up where you can choose which username you want to reply to and then copies it to the clipboard.

This gets really useful when you bind it to a Quicksilver hot key, so your hands don’t ever need to leave the keyboard.

Included in the zip file is the original Automator workflow so you can see what it’s doing, or there’s a pre packaged application with a nice icon ready to be dropped into your applications folder.

Things that will break this:

  • Activating the app when a page other than an individual photo on flickr.com is active in Safari.
  • Using a browser other than Safari.

Download Replyr.zip

iTunes and Last.fm

I just found out that my favourite scrobbling app iScrobbler is still in development. It’s much nicer than the Last.fm one and hides away in your menu bar. I strongly recommend that you use iScrobbler rather than the Last.fm client. Just pop it in your startup items and you’re away.

I’ve been using Last.fm for quite a while, and one of the features that I like the most is that it records what you listen to and builds charts and things. To do this, you need to be running their client, but I was finding that I quite often forgot to start the Last.fm client, so my songs weren’t getting recorded. To stop this from happening, I’ve knocked up a quick Applescript that will start Last.fm and iTunes. It will also quickly pause and then start iTunes playing again if it’s already open. This is so that Last.fm will pick up the currently playing song. I’d use Quicksilver to launch this, but if the thought of applescripts scares you, I’ve made an application that does the same thing too, so you can stick it in your dock or wherever you please.

Download the applescript version

Download the application

If you’re using the applescript version with Quicksilver, you’ll want to stick the .scpt file here:

~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions