• in OmniWeb I can take and add a URL for later reading, it’ll go into my inbox by default
• in OmniWeb I can take and add a URL to my ‘wish-list’ project (with a start date for at 2 weeks in the future)
• in OmniFocus I have scripts to easily change the context or the project of selected tasks
• in Mail I can press a key and have the selected e-mail(s) sent to OmniFocus with a ‘Respond to: ‘ before the subject line, sorting into either a default project or the one specified in MailTags, with the context set to ‘mail’ and the message URL in the note-field
• in OmniFocus I can select such a task, press a key to run a script that will open the message and immediately create a reply (I have a separate one for just opening, in case I have to read it thoroughly first)

All these scripts make the integration between all these programs very easy. That and FastScripts.
I found useful scripts over at Curtis Clifton’s site. His scripts use Growl notification so if you have Growl installed you get a small notification.

I had some trouble putting my own scripts together, so I decided to paste the info here, just in case I need it later on, or someone else runs into similar issues. I found it quite hard to figure out how to add a task to an existing project or to move it from inbox / other project. In the end, it only took a few lines.

First, when I started my script, I wanted a default project or context (I’ll use ‘project’ from now on, but it also applies to the context-script). To do this I created a ‘property’ at the beginning of the script:

I used the alterItemNum for my alerts through this very simple routine:

That went at the end of my script.

I started by addressing OmniFocus and ‘talking’ to the open document:

Then, I checked to see if that document had anything selected, and if not, give an error-dialogue:

If I have no items selected, the script will call the alert routine from above ( my notify(alertName, alertTitle, alertText) ). Because I created a separate routine, I can use this anywhere in the script.

Next, display a dialogue asking for the project:

The variable ‘theProject’ will now contain the name of the (new) project to move the tasks too.

Next, the loop to go through all the items and move them:

This loop will end as soon as the variable ‘selectNum’ (= numItems which I set to the count of the items in the variable SelectedItems) reaches 0. It calls the routine ‘ChangeProject’ which I’ll get to in a bit, but I first want to wrap up this part. Let me also explain the ‘if succeeded then set successTot to successTot + 1′ line. The line before sets ‘succeeded’ to the result of the ChangeProject routine. This result can mean anything, numbers, letters, whatever. In this case we use it to return a ‘true’ or ‘false’. That way, we only need to use ‘if succeeded’ (which will either be ‘true’ or ‘false’) as a condition. We don’t need to check the actual content of the variable. This can come in handy for various checks, and it took me a while to catch on to that, so I figured I’d mention it here.

To end this main routine, I used:

Basically, this tells the dialogue box to say the script ran successfully and displays the number of items successfully moved and only to use the ‘s’ after ‘item’ if the count of successful moves is higher than 1.

That wraps up the main part.

The routine to actually move the task to the other project only took 21 lines:

The first line sets the success to ‘false’, because we want to actively, after having our success, set it to ‘true’.
We then chat with OmniFocus again, and this time, we’ll just talk to the default document (the one you have open). If the variable ‘theProject’ is not empty, we’ll continue. If it is, the ‘if-end if’ ends, without having set the ‘success’ variable to true (and thus, the script failed). You could technically build in an extra loop to change it to a default project, however, I prefer it this way. If I accidentally emptied that dialogue-box, nothing will happen, just as I like it.

If theProject does contain something (anything), the script continues with its routine. It sets the MyProjectArry to null (makes it empty, just in case). It then used OmniFocus complete option to find the first matching project of OmniFocuses project-list. If you’ve ever only typed the first three letters in one of OmniFocus’s project-areas (to set the project) and it magically came up with the right project, this is the same thing. It means you only have to type the first three or four letters of your project, and the script will find it. If it can’t find the project, it will create it for you (at the end of your project-list).

After that, it will simply try to add the task to the desired project.

I’ve copied this part again, because this took me hours to figure out. I knew how to do it for a context-change:

so I tried to ‘set project of newtask to theNewProject’ but that didn’t work. It drove me crazy for a while, still haven’t fully recovered…

But it works! The complete script changes the project of selected tasks and gives a confirmation dialogue (so you know that it happened). Of course, before using it, make a back up of your OmniFocus database, and run the script from Script Editor first. Open the ‘Event Log’ (⌘-3) to follow what happens while you run the script.

zipped up version of ChangeProject and ChangeContext for easy downloading

I also very much like TextExpander and after googling a bit, I ofcourse found an Applescript for TextExpander and Bit.ly. That link also shows how to set it up in TextExpander, very handy! The script does not however use your actual bit.ly account so you can keep track of the URLs you shorten. I tweaked it and made adjustments and it took hours and ofcourse, then I find this which is almost exactly what I had, except with URL-encoding (yummy). The only problem with that one was that I couldn’t get it to have the URLs show up in my recent history. The ‘history=1′ didn’t seem to work.

I tweaked some more and came up with something that completely does what I want. I use OmniWeb so I replaced the

with

If you use safari, use

I’ve made this as readable as possible, the ‘¬’ do matter in Applescript.

ETA (2010.09.30): bit.ly changed a few things so I changed the script above to reflect that

With OmniWeb I can actually watch most of them (though a bit staggering sometimes) because the browser itself doesn’t eat up too many resources (looking at you again Firefox! this hate will soon pass but I will indulge in it a bit). So far I have not once had to close my browser or other programs to reclaim memory / cpu. Closing a few tabs does the trick. Now, I may have to do this every once in a while, but having to do it every two hours (you know who I’m talking about) gets really really annoying.

Aaah, the small pleasures in life… YouTube movies…

And they made it free. I suck for only finding out now, three weeks after they made it free, but at least it means I can have my lovely browser that supports applescript and Services (looking at you, Firefox!), doesn’t take ages to load a page (again, looking at you, Firefox!) and supports non-mouse browsing (Firefox! no wait, that’s actually Safari….).

Very happy :D