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says:This probably applies to a very small audience, aka engineers and programmers who work in a Unix terminal (Linux, Solaris).
With Smart Add, you can mail your new task to your inbox email address from a shell, without having to leave the terminal and disrupt your flow. For example, if you are in the flow working and coding, and Bart asks you over the cube wall to test his code changes he just committed, you could enter the following line on the command line:
mail -s "Test code changes committed by Bart. ^tom @ 9a \!1 #Testing #na @Work" homersimpson+abc123@rmilk.com
First, the mail daemon must be up and running in order to send the email out. Your IT department can ensure this is the case.
Second, the -s option introduces the whole text in double quotes as the email's subject line.
Third, the "bang" character for priority would need to be escaped by a backslash, so that the shell (I'm assuming tcsh, BTW) does not interpret it as something else.
Finally, the properties in the example would cause the task "Test code changes committed by Bart." to be added to homersimpson's RTM account. In addition, the task will have a due date/time of tomorrow at 9:00 a.m., have a high priority, be added to the Testing list (assuming that list exists), be tagged with na (for next action), and be added to the location Work.
Again, I think a very small audience might find this convenient.
Posted at 5:26am on September 11, 2009
says:I'm pretty sure the bang is also used with bash too, so look out for that.
This could be pretty useful if combined with an Automator action on OS X. Bring up a quick text prompt, feed the input as arguments to the mail binary. Nice and lightweight - I like it :)
In fact, the same approach could be used with an Automator Service in Snow Leopard, thanks to Apple's new improvements to that area. Highlight text (perhaps in an email), right click it, "Add to RTM", feed THAT text into the mail command.
You've inspired me here, I might use my free weekend to play about and see if I can put together an elegant enough solution that way. (Until someone else tells me they've already done it)
Posted at 3:21pm on September 11, 2009
says:Expanding on that, it is incredibly easy to turn into a very easy to use Automator Service in Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6).
Using this, you can right click any text and just select "Send to RTM" (or whatever you want to name it) to create it as a task in RTM (probably in your inbox, for you to prioritise and categorise later in a shallow GTD way).
Just fire up Automator, create a "Service" and ensure the drop down at the top reads "Service receives select TEXT in ANY APPLICATION".
Look under the "Utilities" action library and drag a "Run shell script" action into your workflow on the right. Use the bash shell (/bin/bash); it'll probably work just as well with the others, assuming you haven't customised the others to make this not work.
Change "pass input" to "as arguments", and paste the following into the textbox below:
mail -s "$1" username+abc123@rmilk.com
Replacing the email address with yours, obviously, that can be found in the "Info" tab on your settings page.
That $1 basically represents the first argument passed into your shell script here, which is going to be the text you've selected.
Save this service, call it whatever you want (this name will be what appears in your context (right click) menu or services menu) and -- assuming your settings at the top were correct, specifying that you are taking TEXT input from ANY application -- you should see this option when you right click any highlighted text. Hit that option, and you should see that text as a new task in RTM in a matter of seconds.
This is an incredibly simply action, but I'm sure will be very useful to me and everyone else. As stated in the OP, you MUST have a mail delivery daemon running on your machine; which it is by default on OS X. Chances are if you're turned it off, you know how to turn it on.
Passing this text in as an argument to the mail command will also negate the need to escape possible control characters such as the bang (!), so feel free to use whatever text you want in creating tasks this way.
Props to manning999 for alerting me to the simplicity of just using the mail command to throw these things into RTM :)
Posted at 4:41pm on September 11, 2009
