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Quicksilver: AppleScript to quickly add Entourage Tasks

Submitted by Merlin on June 14, 2005 - 7:25am.

Entourage - Fast Task.scpt

A hacker who wishes to remain anonymous has answered my prayers by creating a modest one-line AppleScript that lets you pipe input from Quicksilver into a new Entourage Task with zero cruft—no Category, no Project, no date, and no reminder. Perfect for fast capture any place, and something I’ve craved for over a year.

To install:

Entourage-Fast-Task

  1. Download the script, “Entourage - Fast Task.scpt”
  2. Copy it to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/
  3. Restart Quicksilver (CTRL-CMD-Q)

To use (just one example):

  1. Invoke Quicksilver (usu. CTRL-space)
  2. Type “.” to get the variable input field
  3. Type “Test task”
  4. TAB to the second pane
  5. Type until “Entourage - Fast Task” shows up
  6. Hit Return

Jump over to Entourage and you should have a nice new task sitting in your list. Note that the Quicksilver input, as ever, can come from practically anyplace; you can select text in Safari and “Send to Quicksilver” (CMD-Esc in most locations), etc.

Like I say, if you want all the “trimmings,” you should enter Tasks in Entourage as usual, but this is just terrific for capturing stuff quickly without changing modes. A minor godsend as far as I’m concerned.

(As ever with all my Quicksilver tips, I’m sure I’ve forgotten some critical element that makes this work on your end; if the Setup guide doesn’t answer your question, post a comment)

in

Here’s a question for you...

Submitted by Merlin on June 14, 2005 - 8:31am.

Here’s a question for you AppleScript folks. If I wanted to pass the text to Entourage with a certian category attached to it (so I could, in this example, emulate an inbox), it seems like this should work for line 3…

tell application “Microsoft Entourage” to make new task with properties {name:t, category:”inbox”}

…but I’m getting no luck.

What would that line need to be to work correctly?

Would be cool, because then you could have a custom view that shows just “inbox” tasks—effectively creating a box of tasks that need to be processed regularly.

TIA