Design patterns

(about researchr)

The development of this project was very gradual and iterative, and I added functionality either because I really needed it, or because I had a neat idea and wanted to see if it was possible. During this time, I came across a few “neat ways” of doing things, which I reused a few times. x-bdsk://commons2011power See details of all the files in the repository, and links to the source, at description of all files, and examples of appscript strings.

I used this in two different scripts, gscholar.rb and imfeelinglucky.rb (now defunct because of the API being deprecated). I first grab whatever is selected, and do a search. I parse the search for results, and display the top results through growl. I simultaneously write the top results to a temporary file.

Keyboard Maestro binds CTRL+CMD+ALT+1…6 to another script, which accepts a number as input (ie. CTRL+CMD+ALT+1 is bound to imfeelinglucky-y.rb 1). The second script reads in the temporary file, chooses the appropriate option, and performs the action.

Pashua (see below) might offer a more elegant way of doing this.

Pashua is a framework that makes it very easy to generate GUI dialogs on the fly from command line scripts. I use it to generate the wikipage selector, used by dokuwiki-go.rb, dokuwiki-sbs.rb and dokuwiki-clip.rb. I simply iterate over all the files in /wiki/data/pages, and display these in a drop-down box. Because it automatically searches on typing, it makes it very easy to quickly pull up a relevant page. The user can also manually type in the desired name. (I abstracted this function away into utility-functions.rb).

In trying to make the workflow as non-intrusive as possible, I realized that many times all we do is add the most recently downloaded file to a publication, link to the most recent screenshot, etc. Why not automate this? I use the function File.last_added() in utility-functions.rb in

• skim-screenshots.rb, where it adds the last screenshot to a tmp file, to be parsed and imported when importing the highlights to DokuWiki
• bibdesk-linkfile.rb, to autolink the most recently downloaded PDF to the currently selected publication
• dokuwiki-image.rb, imports most recent screenshot to DokuWiki, and outputs a properly formatted link

I wanted to open PDFs automatically from DokuWiki, and what's more, not just open the PDF (I could presumably just have linked to the file), but also on a specific page. This was inspired by Eboulides, who has a very elaborate workflow which uses DevonThink URLs to open a PDF to a specific page. Skim does not offer a URL schema (see here). However, it's quite easy to create an App wrapper for a tiny Applescript, which runs a ruby file, and in the Info.plist, attaches itself to a certain URL-scheme.

I ended up using this for

• bibdesk: - opens a given citation in BibDesk
• skimx: - opens a given PDF in Skim, optionally goes directly to a certain page (for linking notes)
• ruby: - run any Ruby program, use it for the add author

(You can find these app-files in the github repository, they are easily modifiable for other needs).

I have always liked side-by-side editing interfaces, like the one Scrivener offers. I had the idea that I could use some javascript to load two frames, and Dan Diebolt was kind enough to help me out. It started life as a bookmarklet in the browser, then I put it into the page proper. Finally, I use Ruby to inject the javascript into Chrome through AppleScript for the dokuwiki-sbs.rb script (edit any page next to a wikipage, if it's not a wiki page, it gets processed through Instapaper to look cleaner, and work better in a half window). This is now a key part of my workflow, and I really love how flexible it is.