Exploration Through Example

I just committed a change to a project Laurent Bossavit and I are working on. As a result of that, the following happened:

1. This came via Jabber:
   
2. This was posted to Twitter:
   
3. This came in email:
   
4. This was sent to Campfire:
   

Had I deployed a new version, I would have gotten deployment messages to each of the above, plus in our Trac timeline:

(Trac does a perfectly fine job of handling commits on its own.)

That’s all due to a library of mine called Gossip, which provides a unified interface to all those destinations. It comes with three utility scripts:

• svntell, which you’ve seen.

• watchdog, which reports on the output and duration of a command. (It’s derived from the script in Part 4 of Everyday Scripting with Ruby.)

• fanout, a command that relays a message to the distant destinations. (Our Vlad task uses it to report on deployments.)

The commands and library use the User-Choices library, so they’re configurable up the wazoo.

All this: done in service of ease at work.

I hope you use it.

For any number of purposes (exploratory testing, writing bug reports, getting examples for user’s manuals), I would like the following plugin to Quicksilver. It would be somewhat similar to the iGTD plugin.

• Invoke Quicksilver with its keystroke. Type ‘.’ to start writing a note. Write the note, strike one or a few keys to send it to the notetaker. The notetaker appends it to the open document.

• Invoke Quicksilver. With a few keystrokes, cause it to Grab a snapshot of the topmost window and append it to the document. (So the document handler has to be something that can handle pasted images. Note: if it matters, Pages will paste the image when you put an image on the clipboard and hit Paste. Word and OpenOffice give you the URL in that case. To get the image, you have to Paste Special. In either case, it would probably be best to use a different pasteboard than the one ⌘S uses.)

How hard could it be?

I just bought two useful Mac apps, SpamSieve and EagleFilter.
(more…)