AppleScript’s URL Protocol Support allows the full source code of an AppleScript to be shared through an encoded URL. Here’s a short little TextMate Command for converting AppleScripts to encoded URLs.

Create a new command in TextMate’s AppleScript bundle with the following code:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -KA -rcgi
src = CGI.escape(STDIN.read)
src = src.gsub('+', '%20')
src = 'applescript://com.apple.scripteditor?action=new&script=' + src
`echo -n "#{src}" | pbcopy`
print "The URL encoded AppleScript was copied to the clipboard"

There’s no reason this idea can’t be used for all sorts of stuff. So why not make it easier, it’s not AppleScript, but here’s that code in Script Editor for easier copying.

This is exceptionally fast, much faster than Apple’s provided encoding script. As an extreme example, converting the 558 lines of my iPhoto Date Reset script took just under a minute using Apple’s script. The little Ruby script in TextMate does it instantly. (running the AppleScript in Script Editor with the Event Log Window open took nearly 7 minutes.)

Update: I committed this command to the TextMate Bundles repository and it’s now included in the default set of Bundles shipping with TextMate. (And slightly improved by other TextMate bundle developers)

Here’s a little AppleScript subroutine which converts date objects into correctly formatted RFC date strings: RFCdate() (click to open in Script Editor)

This is a timesaver for anything related to RSS, which requires dates be in the RFC 822 format, ie. Wed, 24 May 2006 01:30:22 -0400

My cousin Sarah, a breast cancer survivor, will be participating in her first Avon Walk for Breast Cancer on July 8-9 in San Francisco. She already met her fundraising goals, but it’d be great if she raised a little more.

Quark’s got a Universal Binary Beta, what have you got??

Working in CS2 on a MacBook Pro is slow and painful. We will probably need new hardware before CS3 ships, that hardware will be Intel Macs. Hurry up or someone’s gonna take your market.

John Gruber linked to the news that Lucas is giving in to demand (eg. money) and will finally release the Star Wars trilogy on DVD in their original, unaltered theatrical format. Han shoots first. John writes:

Bastards. I broke down and finally bought the current DVD trilogy collection just a few months ago — now I’ve got to pay for it yet again just to get the versions of the films that I really want.

Hold your wallet. The release will be in SD, despite the news that HD DVDs will start appearing in stores this summer. Lucas, who is as brilliant a money-maker as he is a horrible dialog-writer, will rake in tons of money selling an obsolete DVD. All the Star Wars films will be available again in HiDef soon enough. And too many people will buy them all for the third, fourth or fifth time.

Lucas isn’t alone. All the studios are flooding the DVD market right now to sell as much as possible before the switch to Blu-Ray or HD-DVD.

Supposedly the porn industry likes likes Blu-Ray best, but you’d have to be delusional to think physical pornography sales are anywhere near as strong as they were before the Internet. Still, porn is generally credited with choosing VHS over BetaMax, at least this time they seem to be going with the better format.

Personally, I think HD-DVD may win this time. Not because it’s better, but because “Blu-Ray” is a dumb name. Ask any non-technical consumer what they want for their new HD TV, HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray disks. Sure a certain percentage of people will have Blu-Ray explained to them, “see, they’re both HD,” but how many will buy on name alone?

Never mind that the name itself looks (and sounds) like blurry. Not what you want to hear when dropping a lot of money to replace a bunch of movies you bought in SD a few years ago.

And so the studios might be slitting their own throats. Movie attendance is down over the past several years. Partly movies are kind of boring now, also suspense and action movies keep dancing around what’s really scary. But the studios now want consumers to re-buy movies they just bought. The great DVD migration wasn’t that long ago, most DVDs were probably purchased within the past 5 years. But now Hollywood wants everyone to buy those movies yet again, and they’re going to spend a fortune on conversion and manufacturing in a bet that consumers will buy the new disks. And if we don’t? Lots of bankruptcies.

I did my annual whirlwind trip to Las Vegas for 40 hours of NAB.

Great to see everyone and meet some new faces. This year though it seemed I missed more people than I saw. However I did get to spend some good time talking with Christoph Vonrhein of CHV. Christoph is scary smart and pushing FXScript way beyond what has been done before.

Buzzless

Not much to get really excited about this year. The whole show seemed to lack a certain energy it’s had in the past. If anything it seems like HD is fully here and now people are figuring out how to work with it.

Lots of people around the show seemed to be complaining about various aspects of Panasonic’s P2 cards. Everyone loves how the video looks, but was down on the workflow. Complaints I overheard included the constant swapping of cards, their still astronomical cost, the lack of third-party cards, 8gb maximum available size, the lack of workable hacks (FireStore excepted) contributed to a general malaise about the format.

Far more hostile were the descriptions of working with HDV. It’s great that the format has a relatively low buy-in cost, but people were spitting blood about working with the files. HDV users seemed angry, frustrated and annoyed. And a lot of them are jealous of the Panasonic image quality, HDV looks mushy by comparison. I heard several people who are using HDV cameras steering others away from HDV cameras.

What that basically tells me is that the prosumer HD space is still very much up for grabs. Maybe that’s why the only perceptable buzz at the show was from RED Digital Cinema.

Except for RED

A lot of people seem to think RED is a joke. I’d be feeling the same way except that I know two people working at the company, Ted Schilowitz and Graeme Nattress. They’re both brilliant and dead serious about this camera. I have total confidence in them, this camera is no joke. Despite the fact that it looks more like a weapon from Unreal Tournament than a camera, and with a $17,500 price tag, the RED camera will completely transform the digital filmmaking marketplace.

In the near-term, HDV may yet become the interim standard. It’s just so much cheaper than anything else. Dealing with HDV files is really a software problem, so maybe Apple will shake a better workflow out of Quicktime and FCP making HDV more fun to use.

Overall it was a great trip. Sometimes, working alone in my little dark office, I forget there are people using the stuff I make. I know how absurd that sounds, but it’s real. Meeting so many Joe’s Filters users and hearing stories about how my filters helped people was revitalizing. Thanks to everyone, there’s more stuff coming soon.