My web browser usage is split between three applications, Safari for general browsing and reading (due to it’s excellent text rendering and look & feel), Firefox for development (due to the “can’t be productive without” Firebug and other developer tools) and NetNewsWire for quick reading of RSS feed articles and reliable session persistence for those pages that I really will read sometime soon, honest.
I use NetNewsWire for session persistence because, unlike Firefox, the implementation is incredibly solid and performance doesn’t seem to hit a wall when you have a stupidly large number of tabs open. The recently released NetNewsWire 3 has a lovely new Omniweb-esque tab style (page thumbnails in a scrollable right-hand column) which I find works really well for maintaining and scanning large numbers of stored pages in comparison to traditional tabs.
NetNewsWire has a ‘Open in Default Browser’ function which I often make use of, however I also often want to do the opposite, that is to dump the foreground Safari URL into NetNewsWire to persist it for later reading. I decided to have a quick excursion into AppleScript and try to script this “copy URL, switch to or start NetNewsWire, open new tab, paste URL” workflow. The script takes the front-most Safari URL (the current tab or window), adds this to NetNewsWire (it will be started in the background if not running) and confirms this via a Growl notification if you have Growl installed.
Here’s the script zipped up: safariaddtonnw.zip. This unzips to the file-name “Add front-most URL to NetNewsWire tabs”.
To use it, turn on the AppleScript menu using Applications → AppleScript → AppleScript Utility and check “Show Script Menu in menu bar”. I have “Show Library scripts” disabled to reduce clutter in the menu.
Switch to Safari, then go to the Script Menu → Open Scripts Folder → Open Safari Scripts Folder. Move the unzipped download into this folder, and you’re done.
To send a URL to NetNewsWire whilst in Safari, go to Script Menu → Add front-most URL to NetNewsWire tabs.
Please let me know if you have any problems with this, and feel free to modify it to fit your needs.
