A while back I came across a piece of software called Sidenote, developed by Pierre Chatel. It’s an incredibly neat little notepad app with a beautifully clean interface that sits on the side of your screen and pops out whenever you need it. At the time I found it originally, I didn’t really see the need for its functionality, but it was so incredibly cool that I kept it around just in case. Last week, when I was looking for a way to keep track of all of the stuff that I had to get done before the end of the term, I dug out Sidenote.
I soon discovered that, while it WAS great at storing my todo list, it also gave me an amazingly quick place to dump all of the other things that I wanted to get done, but couldn’t. I started using it almost as a digital version of my moleskine and soon found that I was getting more done because my mind was clearer.
Of course, it’s arguable that the real reason that I’m currently so enamored with the little program is because of one obscure design detail. When you upgrade to a newer version, the software tells you that it’s going to upgrade your note database. Many developers would have just spent twenty seconds, stuck this message in a standard dialog, and called it good. Pierre went so far beyond this, creating the beautiful animation you see here and making the message fit his interface flawlessly. When I saw the animation, I was struck with this giddy euphoria. “People still care about details!” I thought, and it made my evening so much better. Thanks, Pierre.
Problem: The Mac OS X version of the Flickr Uploadr (http://flickr.com/tools) automatically enters the filename in the title field. Contents of this field override title information that is already stored in the file’s metadata. This means that if you want flickr to read IPTC titles, you have to manually remove all of the automatically entered titles. (If you don’t know why this is a problem, you probably don’t need this script.)
Solution: AppleScript! Using the UI Scripting features present in Mac OS 10.3 and higher, this script will quickly flip through all of the photos in the Uploadr and delete the contents of the title field.
Usage:
1. Open some photos in Uploadr.
2. Once Uploadr has finished generating thumbnails, run the script.
3. Sit back and watch the titles disappear. (Seriously, sit back. Don’t switch to another application while it’s running because it’s going to be simulating hitting the delete key a lot. I take no responsibility if you don’t listen to directions and end up deleting things. You have been warned.)
In order for this script to have any point, you’ll need to have titled your photos and written the metadata back to your original files. I use iView MediaPro to do this, but there are plenty of things out there that can do this. If you happen to be be using iView, you can stick this script in its scripts folder (~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Scripts) and it will appear in the script menu. This offers a convenient place to run it from without having to enable the system-wide script menu.
If you experience problems, email me at uploadr [at] reidab.com.
Feel free to do whatever you want with this script. Hack at it, improve it, break it, distribute it. All I ask is that if you find a way to improve it, let me know (because I use it too) and if you start distributing your own version, take my email address out of it.
