Mac Stuff

For quite a while now you’ve been able to manually backup your entire Address Book. This has saved many people massive heartache when they’ve had their machines go down/did an OS re-install or various other scary things (Yeah, I know, if you have MobileMe you don’t need to do this but most people don’t).

The big issue with backing up this way, as with any backup, is getting people to do it and do it regularly. To backup your Address Book all you need to do it copy the /Users/”user name”/Library/Application Support/AddressBook folder in each users home directory. Simple, direct and easy. But you may have noticed that when you do a manual backup via the Address Book application you get a file with the “.abbu” extension. That’s just the AddressBook folder renamed and getting that extension. The beauty of having this file is when you want to restore your Address Book via the menu you can just point to this file. Otherwise you have to drag the backed up folder to the original spot. Again, not hard to do but some users have problems doing things that go outside of clicking on a menu item.

So, to back up your Address Book and put it in nice “.abbu” file for easy restores just do this:
[codesyntax lang=”bash”]
filedate=`/bin/date “+%m-%d-%y”`
cp -R “/Users/username/Library/Application Support/AddressBook” “/Users/username/Documents/Address Book Backups/Address Book Backup $filedate.abbu”
[/codesyntax]

Obviously you change the “username” section to the name of the home directory. Also, you can change the backup folder to what ever you want. This script just appends the current date to the backup so you can keep multiple backups if needed.

To run this you have a bunch of options:

1. You can run it via cron or launchd. Just put the two lines together and seperated by a “;”.
   You can create the launchd item here – http://plist.spotmac.de/
2. You can run it as an Automator iCal plug-in. Just drag over the “Run Shell Script” action and paste in the script. Then schedule it via iCal.
3. You can save it as a script and run it from what ever automation application you prefer.

admin :: Oct.19.2010 :: Automator, Management, Scripts, shell scripts :: Comments Off on How to back up Address Book automatically

I just had a need to write a quick script that told me what the color space of an image was (RGB, CMYK, Gray, etc.). So obviously I turned to AppleScript. AppleScript has a nice Scripting Addition called Image Events that can read lots of different information about an image. You can get all the details on the Image Events addition as well as some good examples here.

The one problem I found with Image Events was that it gagged whenever it looked at a grayscale image. No idea why. But, after doing some more research I found that Image Events is based on a UNIX command line tool named sips. Using sips and the AppleScript do shell script command I was able to get the information I needed.

For my immediate purposes I just wanted a script I could run, select a file and get the color information. So that’s what this script does.

[codesyntax lang=”applescript” lines=”no”]
set theFile to (quoted form of the POSIX path of (choose file))
set theColorSpace to (do shell script “sips -g space ” & theFile)
set oldDelims to AppleScript’s text item delimiters
try
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to “:”
set theColor to text item 2 of theColorSpace as text
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to oldDelims
on error
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to oldDelims
end try
display dialog “The color space is: ” & theColor[/codesyntax]

Notice I had to set the file path to the POSIX path of the file. The POSIX path is the actual Unix style path name (ex. /Users/joe/image.jpg). I also had to use the quoted form part of AppleScript to deal with any spaces that might be in the file names. Running this will give you a dialog box with the name of the color space for this file.

Since Image Events can get lots of other bits of information and it’s easier to manipulate then having to parse. So, I combined AppleScript and Automator to make a Finder plug-in. I developed this Automator script to display the image’s size in pixels, resolution, color space and width in picas. It’s being used by a publisher here to quickly check sizes of images to make sure they meet certain requirements. I expect I’ll be adding things and tweaking it as I go.

Click on Image Info Automator workflow to download the workflow. Save it out as a Finder plug-in to use with any selected images.

admin :: Apr.12.2007 :: Applescript, Automator, Scripts :: Comments Off on Finding an image’s color space using AppleScript

I have lots of users where I work that have folders full of pictures that they just want to import into PowerPoint. I came up with this Automator workflow to allow just that.

It makes a new PowerPoint presentation, then lets you select the folder that contains the images you want to import. It then pads the images so that they fit onto a standard PowerPoint slide and imports them.

This workflow uses actions from the Microsoft Automator Actions package.

Click on PowerPoint AutoImport Workflow to download

admin :: Mar.20.2007 :: Applescript, Automator :: Comments Off on Automator workflow to import images into PowerPoint