Converting OmniFocus to The Hit List

Since The Hit List finally reached 1.0, I decided to take another look at it. I already had a license, although I haven’t used it for a long time. One thing keeping me from using it was all of my projects & tasks that I have in OmniFocus.

I wrote this AppleScript to get my tasks from OmniFocus into The Hit List. It’s still a work in progress & has some limitations, like not supporting nested tasks & not importing the context for tasks. You can download the script here.

 

property myfolder : ""

property currentList : ""

 

on exportOneTask(thing)

tell application "OmniFocus"

if thing is not completed then

set nm to (name of thing)

set sd to start date of thing

set dd to due date of thing

set ct to the context of thing

set nt to note of thing

if ct is not equal to missing value then

nm = nm & " @" & (name of ct)

end if

tell application "The Hit List"

set props to {timing task:nm, notes:nt}

if sd is not equal to missing value then

set props to props & {start date:sd}

end if

if dd is not equal to missing value then

set props to props & {due date:dd}

end if

tell currentList to make new task with properties props

end tell

end if

end tell

end exportOneTask

 

on exportList(thing)

set nm to (name of thing)

tell application "The Hit List"

tell myfolder to set currentList to make new list with properties {name:nm}

end tell

tell application "OmniFocus"

repeat with t in (tasks of thing)

my exportOneTask(t)

end repeat

end tell

end exportList

 

on exportFolder(thing)

set nm to (name of thing)

tell application "The Hit List"

tell selected group to set myfolder to make new folder with properties {name:nm}

end tell

tell application "OmniFocus"

repeat with p in (projects of thing)

if p is not completed then

my exportList(p)

end if

end repeat

end tell

end exportFolder

 

tell application "OmniFocus"

-- set docSource to default document

my exportFolder(default document)

repeat with f in (folders of default document)

my exportFolder(f)

end repeat

end tell


Quick update

After Sugar Rush Free was approved, I discovered it was using the wrong leaderboard name to submit scores to Game Center. I just submitted a quick update (version 1.0.3) which fixes it. Hopefully it won’t take too long to approve.

How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory | Rolling Stone Politics

Great article in Rolling Stone telling how Roger Ailes uses Fox News to distort and shape American politics:

The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Roger Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”

Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones news­gathering operation – Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent. Nearly half comes from advertising, and the rest is dues from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits.”

The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. “Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all,” says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp. researching a biography of the Australian media giant. “People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News.”

Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: His network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces like the planned “terror mosque” near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Koran. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes’ business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. “You know Roger is crazy,” Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. “He really believes that stuff.”

According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That’s because Ailes isn’t interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimization.

“What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame,” says Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. “He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilizes it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment. He’s the golden thread.”

Fox News stands as the culmination of everything Ailes tried to do for Nixon back in 1968. He has created a vast stage set, designed to resemble an actual news network, that is literally hard-wired into the homes of millions of America’s most conservative voters. GOP candidates then use that forum to communicate directly to their base, bypass­ing the professional journalists Ailes once denounced as “matadors” who want to “tear down the social order” with their “elitist, horse-dung, social­ist thinking.” Ironically, it is Ailes who has built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc, pioneering a business model that effectively monetizes conservative politics through its relentless focus on the bottom line. “I’m not in politics,” Ailes recently boasted. “I’m in ratings. We’re winning.”

The existence of Fox News and the failure of other news outlets to call them out on their lies is proof that the so-called “Liberal Media” doesn’t exist.

Links for 2011-5-18 through 2011-5-21

Links for 2011-5-18 through 2011-5-21:

  • Google Prediction API – Google Code The Prediction API enables you to make your smart apps even smarter. The API accesses Google's machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes.
  • Birtherism, the debt ceiling, climate change, evolution: Are Republicans losing their grip on reality? – By Jacob Weisberg – Slate Magazine Christie is not part of the natural constituency for Darwin-denial. He's an intelligent man, a lawyer, a fiscal rather than a social conservative. But Christie is also someone who might want to run for president someday, or be selected as someone's running mate. For those purposes, he must constantly ask himself the question: Am I about to say something to which a white, evangelical, socially conservative, gun-owning, Obama-despising, pro-Tea Party, GOP primary voter in rural South Carolina might object? By this standard, simple acceptance of the theory of evolution becomes a risky stance. To lie or to duck? Christie chose the option of ducking while signaling his annoyance at being put in this ridiculous predicament.
  • How to send messages safely to your server This post describes a general method of sending messages to a server in a way that prevents hackers from acting like your app. Specifically, I’ll tell you exactly how to add HMAC authentication to your app’s network messages.
  • Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices | Nettuts+ Database operations often tend to be the main bottleneck for most web applications today. It’s not only the DBA’s (database administrators) that have to worry about these performance issues. We as programmers need to do our part by structuring tables properly, writing optimized queries and better code. Here are some MySQL optimization techniques for programmers.
  • Use Daylight White Balance for Outdoor Shooting, Not AWB | Digital Photography insights Auto white balance sounds like it solves every issue regarding colors in your pictures, but it doesn't. For example, when you shoot at sunset or sunrise, AWB wants to 'correct' the golden tones that we love so much when the sun is close to the horizon. It desaturates the yellow and red portion of the spectrum, and the colors look weak and disappointing. By contrast, if you shoot with daylight white balance, you will capture the colors you see. The yellows, reds, and oranges will be saturated and dramatic.

Posted by Postilicious

Links for 2011-5-15 through 2011-5-17

Links for 2011-5-15 through 2011-5-17:

  • Six unexpected uses for the Application Switcher | Business Center | Working Mac | Macworld You’ve probably got the basics of the Application Switcher down pat by now: press Command-Tab to see a bar full of running-application icons and keep Command down as you tap the Tab key to quickly switch to the application of your choice. But, as with everything on the Mac, the Application Switcher can do more than you might guess.
  • Oppugn.us: Where The Rants Go – Programming, M_____F_____ I think I'm going to create the ultimate software development methodology. It'll be revolutionary compared to others because it will focus on the one thing that gets software done. Its entire focus will be this one, glorious, completely useful activity for writing software. It's name even embodies the perfection of this programming methodology. The name is:

    Programming, Motherfucker

  • Free Faces This is a website dedicated to free fonts that are readily available on the web that I use regularly and would like to share. Of course free fonts aren't always the best option and good typography isn't just about pretty fonts, but there are a few out there that are more than worth a look, and I have featured some of my favourites here.
  • Lost Type Co-op The Lost Type Co-Op is a Pay-What-You-Want Type foundry, the first of it's kind.

    Founded by Riley Cran and Tyler Galpin, originally in a whirlwind 24 hour adventure to distribute a single typeface, Lost Type has blossomed into a full fledged foundry, distributing fonts from designers all over the world, with it's unique model.

  • Weekend project, 30 minutes marketing? Spend at least as much time marketing your project, as you did building it, if not more. Email bloggers, run contests, reach out to people on Twitter, etc. I'm no marketing guru, and I'm looking for great marketing strategies as much as everyone else, but I am convinced that the following is true: If you put in the time, the people will follow. If you build for two days, you should spend two days reaching out to people and helping them find out why your product, site, whatever is amazing.

Posted by Postilicious