9thport ruby, rails, sysadmin, os x, and other stuff

Making use of prefrences in applescripts with the Griffin PowerMate and email

Okay, I own a PowerMate gadget that I have not used in a very very long time. So this afternoon I deiced to play with it and make a couple of scripts that help me at work.

My first task was to make the thing pulse when I have unread email in my inbox. After some simple searching I found a nice entry at macosxhints.com about the script. I also found some smart posts that contained some very effcient apple scripts. One them had a nice idea of using the "say" command to make the mac speak some text! I found this to be very entertaining and started to think how I could use this when I wanted to.

Just a little side note: I have decided to stop checking my email ever 10 seconds and move that to 10 minutes. I find that checking email or seeing that I have unread email ever 10 seconds or so is very distruptive in the moment of my thoughts and projects. So I have decided to increment my email checking to 10 minutes for now. I might even increase this to 20 minutes. Not sure yet.

Back to the script. I liked the idea of a script telling me when it was checking my email but I wanted to have the ability to toggle this on and off with a prefrences setting. After a little searching, I found a great idea and put it to good use. It was so good that I had to write it down because I know I will be trying to implement this in future scripts.

Iteration 1

I came up with this design:

set mac_speak to (do shell script "defaults read com.AaronsAppleScripts.pref 'macSpeak'")

if mac_speak is "true" then
say "Processing email"
end if

try
tell application "System Events" to if (exists process "Mail") is false then
set theCount to 0
else
tell application "Mail" to set theCount to unread count of inbox
end if

if theCount > 0 then
tell application "PowerMateDaemon" to set pulse always to true
else
tell application "PowerMateDaemon"
set pulse always to false
set brightness to 0
end tell
end if
end try

if mac_speak is "true" then
say "Finished"
end if

Explanation of the preferences

To use the preferences here are the following examples of commands to type in your terminal:

set the value to true:

defaults write com.AaronsAppleScripts.pref 'macSpeak' 'true'

set the value to false:

defaults write com.AaronsAppleScripts.pref 'macSpeak' 'false'

read the preference:

defaults read com.AaronsAppleScripts.pref 'macSpeak'

use preferences inside apple scripts:

do shell script "defaults read com.AaronsAppleScripts.pref 'macSpeak'"