If you use any applications with Cocoa-based text editors (TextEdit, Mail.app, and many more), you may have noticed that some of them, like Mail.app, recognize URLs and automatically turn them into links. The links are in Rich Text Format (RTF) and can be copied and pasted into other RTF-compatible text fields. To the best of my knowledge, though, there's no easy way to automate the creation of an RTF hyperlink, via AppleScript or other means. In programs that don't detect URLs, or if you want to link text to a URL, you generally have to select text, go to a menu item (Link..., Link Add..., etc.) that's a few submenus down, and then enter the url. Me? I'm always looking for the easy way out...

Last night, I put together a shell script that allows you to trick the iPhone into thinking that amr files added to the voicemail folder are actual voicemails. To make this happen, I ported sqlite3 to the iPhone (You can download a copy here). I also wrote a csh script, which you can download here and a time utility, here. The reason I wrote the script in csh rather than bash (both of which appear in the standard binary distribution kit) is just that I'm more familiar with csh.

To run the script, supply it with the amr file as its one argument, e.g. copy2vmail foo.amr. The script copies the amr file to the voicemail folder and updates the voicemail database as if the voicemail were received at the current time.

To force voicemail to update and re-read the database, enter the phone application and quit it by holding down the home button for 4-8 seconds. Re-enter the phone application and, with luck, you will see the recording as new voice message from "VoiceRecorder".

Thanks, Spaced.

1. Launch Terminal.
2. In Terminal, enter: touch nowplaying
3. In Terminal, enter: open -e nowplaying
4. In TextEdit, paste the following into nowplaying. The second line wraps here but should copy and paste correctly--at least it did when I tried it out.
   #! /bin/bash
   osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to if player state is playing then "Now Playing: " & name of current track & " - " & artist of current track'
5. Save the file in TextEdit and close it.
6. In Terminal, enter: chmod 755 nowplaying
7. Open iTunes and start playing a song.
8. In Terminal, enter: ./nowplaying

The script, when run, outputs the track name and artist.

% ./nowplaying
Now Playing: Everything I've Got - Iain Archer
%

Thanks Dave M

Gallery: Adding "Now Playing" to your desktop

Update: For those of you who don't want to keep iTunes open:
#! /bin/bash
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to if ((name of processes) contains "iTunes") then do shell script ("osascript -e " & quoted form of ("tell application \"iTunes\" to if player state is playing then \"Now Playing: \" & name of current track & \" - \" & artist of current track" & ""))'

• Griffin AirClick (as well as several other Griffin devices)
• Applescript
• iTunes monitor
• iChat monitor
• Mail monitor
• Growl notification
• Open file
• Open URL
  
• Write to file