Choose Between GeekTool and NerdTool

GeekTool and NerdTool are two programs that do the same thing: display stuff on your desktop. The choice between which one to use is up to you but allow me to give a few suggestions:

• If you want to change the text colors used in the display, choose NerdTool (as far as I know, GeekTool can only change the default text color but not the actual colors used for “red”, “blue background”, “bright green” etc.)
• If you want to hack on the program yourself, choose NerdTool (it’s open source).
• If you don’t care about any of the above, choose GeekTool.

Install the Apps

When you’ve chosen which one you’d like to use, download and install it. GeekTool is a preference pane so it lives in your System Preferences, while NerdTool is a regular application which you drag into your Applications folder.

In order to install icalBuddy, download the latest version and unzip the package by double-clicking on it. Open the unzipped folder, double-click on install.command and follow the instructions (you’ll have to press return, input your password and icalBuddy will be installed).

Figure out Your icalBuddy Configuration

So now you need to figure out what to put into the command field in Geek-/NerdTool. First you need to go to the icalBuddy Usage Examples page and browse through it — you might find the kind of output you’re looking for right there, in which case you can just get the command you see there (note that some of the examples require you to add something to the configuration file).

If you’d like to take some of the examples and modify the output a bit, you can fire up your Terminal.app and start experimenting with different arguments. In this case the documentation links will come in handy.

Add Your icalBuddy Command into GeekTool/NerdTool

Once you have your command, you can put it into the app by creating a new “shell” entry:

• GeekTool: Drag the “Shell” geeklet icon (see below) onto your desktop. The properties window for this entry should appear.



• NerdTool: Click the “plus” button (see below) and select “Shell” from the popup. A new entry is created into the list above.

You can then insert your icalBuddy command into the command field in whichever app you’re using (and set the refresh interval in order to specify how often the command should be run):

That’s it. You can then delve into the settings that both GeekTool and NerdTool offer you, like changing the colors and fonts used for the output.

Demo

Here’s a small demo where you can see the feature at work: Font List Example. The sources shown below are used in this demo.

Implementation

We need a small Flash app and some Javascript. Below is the source code for the Flash app.

Note that you don’t need the Flash authoring app from Adobe in order to compile this; you can simply use the mxmlc compiler in the Flex SDK (which is open source).

Notice how the Flash app calls a Javascript function populateFontList() via the ExternalInterface. Now we just need to implement that function in the page where we embed the Flash object:

I read somewhere that Safari (or the OS? or iTunes?) sometimes decides to “fix” the mappings of iTunes URL protocol handlers, forcing you to “play cat and mouse” if you decide to prevent iTunes from automagically opening up by removing it as the itms: protocol handler, so I decided that it would be best to try and fix this problem by messing with the iTunes website source via GlimmerBlocker, which I already was using for ad blocking.

I couldn’t find any straightforward directions on how to do this with GlimmerBlocker so I decided to post it here myself once I figured out how to do it. So this is how I prevented iTunes from automatically opening up whenever I open up a store link in my browser:

• Open the GlimmerBlocker “filters” tab and add a new filter, as well as a new rule for this filter.
• Select Whitelist URL, optionally modifying content as the action
• For the Host section, select is as the predicate and type in itunes.apple.com
• Select ignored for both Path and Query
• Switch to the transform tab and type in the following:
replace(/detectAndOpenItunes\(\);/g, "<!-- detectAndOpenItunes() zapped -->");
• Make sure the Only for content-type selection in the bottom-right corner of the dialog sheet is html
• Save

This seems to correctly prevent the iTunes app from opening up whenever a store website is opened, but it still allows for opening the viewed product in the stand-alone app via the “View in iTunes” link on the page.

There are many solutions for tagging files for OS X and other platforms, but I’ve tried to be judicious about adopting any method or solution that would somehow seem like too much of a hack and not something that makes an effort to integrate into the OS. The file metadata system in OS X is something that I believe can be used to solve this issue, and Punakea, which is a tagging application that saves tags you add for files into their “Spotlight comments” metadata fields, was the first thing that seemed like something I should try. Well, I did try it, and quite liked it, so I started researching ways to make tagging files with it as quick and effortless as possible.

I wanted to be able to simply select a file in Finder, hit a keyboard shortcut to go into “tagging mode”, type in some tags, and hit another keyboard shortcut to save the tags into the file and leave the “tagging mode”. People have found quite effective ways to do this, most notably (in my opinion) by invoking Punakea’s tagger window via assigning a Finder shortcut for its “Tag File” service. This worked quite well, but I had a pet peeve about the fact that the tags field in Punakea’s tagger window was fully selected by default, which meant an extra “right arrow” key press to move the insertion point to the end of the list before starting to type in any extra tags. This, combined with the fact that I was eager to learn some more Objective-C, prompted me to write Tagger.

Tagger is a simple application that takes one file as an argument when it launches and allows you to edit its tags. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

Thanks to the lovely fact that Nudge:Nudge, the makers of Punakea, have released the tagging framework they use in Punakea as open source, I was able to just use that in Tagger as the basis for working with the tags. This fact also makes Tagger and Punakea (and also any other applications that use the same framework) inherently compatible. In future versions of Tagger I’ll probably try to work on adding alternative tag storage methods (a custom format for tags saved into Spotlight Comments is probably first on the list.)

I have set up a separate page on this site for Tagger, where you can find more info on how to use it, the changelogs for different versions, and of course the download links.

The Problem

The N82 iSync plug-in implements syncing features through the SyncML protocol that Nokia has been supporting in its phones for a while now, as opposed to the built-in support for the 3230, which was implemented via a piece of “sync agent” software that had to be installed on the phone. The installation of the plug-in went well, and I was quickly on my way to synchronizing my contacts and calendars onto the phone from my MacBook. When I looked at the results, though, I soon found out that all-day events from iCal were synchronized to the phone as meetings starting at 00:00 and ending at 23:59, instead of memos, which is how the phone calendar handles the concept of an “all-day event”. Additionally, when I tried to edit one of these all-day events (ones that were created in iCal, that is) on the phone and sync the changes back to the Mac, I got an error message from iSync saying that changing all-day events on the phone is not allowed. This was not the case with the 3230, which interpreted all-day events created in iCal properly and allowed for changing them on the phone as well (thanks to Apple’s sync agent software, I guess.) This would not fly.

Research

I Started to research the issue with my BFF Google, and found out that this was a pretty common problem with recent S60 phones and their iSync plug-ins. Some suggested workarounds for other S60 phones included mentions of the MetaClasses.plist file in the iSync plug-in bundle (and some keys therein,) so this is what I started to look at next. Apparently the iSync plug-ins that Nokia offers are created with the “iSync Plug-in Maker” software that Apple ships with OS X (it’s in the Developer Tools package that you have to install manually,) so I fired that up to investigate further. In the “Advanced options” section of that software I found an interesting option called “All-day event format” that seems to correspond with the AllDayEventFormat key in the MetaClasses property list.

The description for that key in iSync Plug-in Maker offers two example values. By browsing the web and going through the MetaClasses.plist files of other (built-in) iSync plug-ins for S60 phones I collected a couple more possible values:

• AllDayEventMidnight (this is the default value in the N82 plug-in)
• AllDayEventWithoutTime
• AllDayEventCategoriesAndMidnight
• AllDayEventCategories

Some Testing, More Research and a Revelation

I then started testing each of these. After each time I saved a new value in the property list for this key, I added all-day events for the current date in both iCal and the phone calendar, and then synced. This produced some initial results, but I also wanted to test editing the events, so I proceeded to edit the event made on the phone in iCal, and the event made in iCal on the phone, syncing again afterwards.

The results were varying, but none of the values I tried solved the problem completely. The most promising was AllDayEventCategoriesAndMidnight, which kept the original behaviour but allowed for editing the events created in iCal on the phone. This was not enough for me, of course, so I started googling a bit more to find some other things to try out with this property list. Then I managed to stumble upon this post on a Finnish Mac-themed message board (sorry, it’s in finnish.) It seemed “juksu” had fixed this same problem for his Nokia N90 by merging some of the key/value pairs from the Apple-provided Nokia N73 iSync plug-in’s MetaClasses.plist onto the corresponding file in his phone’s plug-in bundle.

I took a look at some of the property list keys juksu mentioned in his post, and started copying the ones that seemed to somehow make sense (with regard to the issue) into the N82 plug-in’s plist. After some trial and error I managed to find the keys and values I had to use in order to get the thing to work.

The Conclusion

It seems I have the problem solved now: all-day events created in iCal show up on the phone as memos and editing them on the phone doesn’t result in an error message anymore:

Otherwise the thing seems to function as usual (as in: I haven’t found this hack to result in any sort of collateral damage,) although I haven’t really been using the calendars properly after doing this. I will report here if I notice any weird behaviour, though. Below I’ve summarized the steps needed to apply this hack to the plug-in:

1. Install the N82 iSync plug-in
2. Make a backup copy of the MetaClasses.plist file somewhere (you can find it in /Library/PhonePlugins/Nokia_N82_1v1.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources/MetaClasses.plist)
3. Open the original file in a text editor
4. Make the following edits under “com.apple.pimsync.parser.vCal”:
• Change the value of the “AllDayEventFormat” key to “AllDayEventCategoriesAndMidnight”
• Add the following below the “AllDayEventFormat” key/value combo:
<key>PropertyNameMapping</key>
<dict>
    <key>CATEGORIES</key>
    <string>X-EPOCAGENDAENTRYTYPE</string>
</dict>
<key>AllDayCategories</key>
<array>
    <string>EVENT</string>
    <string>ANNIVERSARY</string>
</array>
<key>TimedCategories</key>
<array>
    <string>APPOINTMENT</string>
</array>
5. Save the file
6. Open iSync, purge the calendar data on your phone and then sync

You can also just download the MetaClasses.plist file that I’ve been using: N82iSyncPluginFix-MetaClasses.plist.zip