I just noticed this today when one of my scripts was broken. Apparently from Camino 1.5 to 1.6 the open URL and the get URL commands were dropped and replaced by open location. If you have any uncompiled Applescripts using the open URL or the get URL commands, you should make the change to open location.

Note: compiled Applescripts that use either of the old commands should still work.

Update:
In my testing, the problem with using the old syntax only exhibits itself when using osascript from the command line. Using “Get URL” in the Script Editor still seems to work.

The syntax on the command line should look like this:

osascript -e 'tell application "Camino"' -e 'open location "http://geek.thinkunique.org"' -e 'end tell'

Have you ever wanted to make mp3’s out of your videos (e.g. music videos) so you can load the audio onto your iPod or listen to it in your favorite music player?

This simple Applescript droplet will do just that. Drop your video onto the Video to mp3.app icon, type in the desired bitrate, and it will immediately start converting the first audio track to a mp3. Give it a try. It works with many different video formats including VOB.

Video to mp3.app (video_to_mp3.zip)

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You know the annoying “You’ve got mail!” that AOL says when, of course, you’ve (you, not me) got mail?

I was setting up Mail.app on a user’s new laptop one day, when she asked me if it would say “You’ve got mail!” when she gets new mail. Ugh. I told her no, but that I might be able to make it do that. So here is an Applescript that will save to file whatever text you enter, in whatever voice you choose.
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Do you need to create a DVD image of a movie you made? Do you need to image and burn a copy of a DVD from your DVR? There are a lot of uses for this simple droplet which uses mkisofs for its imaging. A co-worker of mine found it useful for duplicating home videos that his wife is burning with a DVR.

My initial reason for creating DVD Image Utility was because I needed a method to burn some DVD compliant discs without having to buy a third-party application, such as Toast. Unfortunately, the Mac’s built-in hdiutil will not create a DVD compliant image. Once the resulting image was burned to a DVD-R, it would not play in all DVD players. The same DVD created and burned with DVD Image Utility has played in all DVD players that I have had the opportunity to try.

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Wanna download all 702 pages of the CIA’s recently declassified historical documents known as the “Family Jewels”? Then cURL is your friend.

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I was looking for a way to have an AppleScript round a number to the nearest even, whole number. I did some googling and found some examples of rounding with AppleScript, but I had to modify them to do exactly what I wanted. Here is what I came up with:

property this_number : ""
display dialog “Enter a number” default answer this_number
set the this_number to text returned of result
set rounded to (round (this_number) rounding up)
if rounded mod 2 is not 0 then
set evenNum to (rounded - 1)
else
set evenNum to rounded
end if


I know there are solutions out there for video transcoding such as the awesome ffmpegX, but I wanted to make my own solution. I drop my source video onto this droplet, and with just a few button clicks, I can convert almost any video to an mpeg2 that is DVD compliant. What I did here was make an AppleScript droplet which is an application bundle and contains the binaries, ffmpeg, pulldown, and mplex. Pulldown and mplex are necessary if you are starting with a 23.98fps source and want to keep it at that rate.

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