Adding Date Suffixes With TextExpander

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know AppleScript, code, programming or anything else of the sort. I bodged this by Googling for 'AppleScript date suffix', visiting various blogs and jamming stuff together until it worked. I'm sure there's a better way (if there is, let me know).

I use TextExpander, the text expansion app, a lot. Combined with keyboard shortcuts on iOS, I don't think I've typed my full email address in years. Mostly it helps me with repetitive / easy to forget / easy to misspell stuff (watch Merlin Mann or MacSparky in action to get the idea), but I do use one or two little tricks that I've not found elsewhere.

One of these is for dates. TextExpander's date features are great - it can drop in today's date in a bunch of different formats really easily. You can also do simple maths and slightly less simple things like generating urls for sites with custom date ranges (I'll share my 'today' Analytics snippet sometime). The only problem I've found is that TextExpander doesn't have a feature for adding suffixes (y'know 'st', 'nd', 'rd' & 'th', as in '1st', '2nd', '3rd' & '4th').

This bugged me. I like to include the full date (eg. '22nd November 2012') on invoices because I do some work for US clients and marking something '02/03/12' can mean 2nd of March to me and 3rd of February to them. I've often confused myself and likely confused others.

By default, the closest TextExpander'll come is: '22 November 2012'. That's pretty good, but I wanted '22nd'. Using a little bit of AppleScript, I came up with this:

set {day:d} to (current date)
set suffix to "th"
if d is 1 then set suffix to "st"
if d is 2 then set suffix to "nd"
if d is 3 then set suffix to "rd"
if d is 21 then set suffix to "st"
if d is 22 then set suffix to "nd"
if d is 23 then set suffix to "rd"
if d is 31 then set suffix to "st"
if d is 32 then set suffix to "nd"
(d) & (suffix) as string

That'll give you '1st' on the 1st, '2nd' on the 2nd and '3rd' on the 3rd. Just make that an AppleScript snippet, then add that snippet it to the start of your existing date generator and Bob's your uncle, today's full date.

As I said, that might be sloppy code - I don't know. It's Greek to me. I just slapped away at it until it worked. It does work, though. The above screencast maybe explains things a little more clearly (or maybe it doesn't, I'm not the clearest speaker in the world). Let's date.

Innis & Gunn Artwork

Work! I'm supposed to post bloody work here, aren't I? It's easy to forget that sometimes.

In 2012, I was lucky enough to work with Innis & Gunn, the Edinburgh-based brewer of delicious oak-aged beer, on a couple of projects. I'm very proud to have been on board (they're a damn fine company and it's damn fine beer).

For I&G's involvement in the Edinburgh Film Festival, I made a little cartoon (above) depicting the importance of the oak-aging process to the unique flavour of their beer. Although short, this was still the most ambitious hand-drawn animation I've ever tried and I think it turned out pretty good, considering.

The animation was edited down to a lean 60 pages and made into a lovely little flickbook that was distributed amongst festival-goers back in June. It can be seen at the end of the short video I made below:

(note, it's surprisingly hard to flick a flickbook straight-through only once while holding it in front of a video camera. Please forgive my slightly juddery attempt. Music is 'P' from the album John's ABC by the Fence Collective.)

Using a combination of the old-fashioned (drawing stuff over-&-over-&-over) and the new-fangled: (Photoshop trickery), I was able to put the whole thing together on a fairly short turnaround. Although frustrating, tedious and difficult, animation is something that I hope to explore further. My Wired illustrations, which I animate for their iPad app every month, are getting increasingly ambitious and are good practice.

Innis & Gunn Edinburgh cityscape illustration

I also produced a few illustrations for their beautiful Bartender's Choice book, including the above Edinburgh cityscape and a small set of drawings depicting various stages of the brewing process.

(more on the Bartender's Choice section of my site)

Big thanks to Lucy and everyone over at I&G for getting me involved and for all their help - they've been amazing to work with. Fingers-crossed, I'll have more to share in the spring.

Oh, and not that I like to toot-my-own-trumpet too loudly, I'll just that, when it comes to perks, this job had one or two:

It's been tricky, but I've kept some aside for Hogmanay. Dancer.

My Instagram Web Profile

Instagram is rolling out its web profile pages this week and mine just went live. Once they're done, everyone's public photographs will be viewable through a normal web browser. This'll make it super easy to share / follow / find people from links and blog posts (such as this).

Here I've quickly put together 3 sets of photos that I really love, loosely themed around animals, people and places.

Revisiting my own wee archive has been interesting - 402 photos over two years. All stuff that at some point, I reckoned was worth sharing. Some of my early uploads were pretty heavy on the filters but, on the whole, I think they hold up not too badly. Mostly.

The square format keeps Instagram photos out of my yearly montages and it's nice to now have a place I can browse through them easily. The selective nature of the app actually creates quite a tightly edited little gallery when you view it all at once.

I still use Instagram a lot, quite carefully choosing who to follow (mostly people I know) and trying to stay up to date with my timeline. Uploading is something I do only when I feel that I've got something funny or interesting to share and I loosely stick to a 1-a-day limit because, man, nobody really cares about someone else's God damn trip to the beach too much at all.

Follow me (if you like) at Instagram.com/davidgalletly.

Guy Fawkes Night

I loved the view from our flat when we first moved to Glasgow. That winter (2010) was particularly beautiful. Then, for a little while, I hated it. In the distance I could see the building I worked in and I'd know that, after a miserable cycle, I'd be over there, sitting at a desk in a job I hated. Whenever I looked out, that's all I'd think about.

Now that I work from home, I love the view again. On a clear day you can see all the way to the Campsies. If I want to (and don't have a mountain of work to wade through), I can pick a place and go there. My old workplace no longer taunts me, seeing it makes me smile. I even cycle my old commute when I need some exercise - it's a really nice route.

Tonight is the 5th of November and the air is filled with fireworks. While the above video isn't the most spectacular in the world (my camera isn't great in the dark), it sums up fairly well the pops, bangs, fizzes and whizzes that've peppered the 2 or 3 miles between my window and my old desk.

Happy Guy Fawkes Night.

My Blog Now Has A Twitter Feed

Twitter Transform
I have created a Twitter feed that will automatically link to new blog posts. If you would like to be notified when I write stuff, please follow @galletlyblog.

This is an unobtrusive service that only tweets once per update (I don't want to spam anyone). It is completely robotic and won't do anything beyond this simple task. It wont get offended if you unfollow it and probably won't answer back if you talk to it.

As always, I'm @davidgalletly on Twitter and my RSS feed is alive and kicking for adding my blog to a reader.

TRANSART: Art on Cars, Inverness

Team Recoat return to Inverness this weekend for TRANSART - a live street art project where a bunch of artists (myself included) paint the hell out of some cars that have been kindly donated by members of the public.

As I write, I am literally packing my bags / running late for the trip up but, should you be interested, please stop by Falcon Square on Friday 26th and Saturday 27th October from 12 - 6pm to see us at work. There are more details on Inverness Old Town Art's page.

We'll all be tweeting / Instagramming (my username is davidgalletly) / blogging / Facebooking / etc. no doubt. If you're around, say hello.

Vote The List Sex Issue as Scottish Cover of the Decade

The List's Sex Issue from early 2011 has been included alongside 11 other magazines as the potential "Scottish Magazine Cover of the Decade". This is especially exciting, to me at least, as I bloomin' drew the dirty drawing on the cover.

The winner, which will be decided by public vote, will be announced at a swanky awards ceremony on the 25th of October with voting closing the day before on the 24th. Everybody gets 1 vote per day so, y'know, make your voice heard. Together we can make a difference. Vote here.

Seriously though, if you pick mine (or share this info), I will be super, duper grateful. Thanks to everyone who has already voted and thanks to the guys at The List for getting me involved in the first place. Cheers x

Paris

At the end of September we went to Paris for a week. It was a belated honeymoon of sorts (technically honeymoon pt.2 as we took a wee trip to Jersey immediately after the wedding to relax). While there, I shot some little clips with my point-&-shoot and edited them together into a video.

It was the best.

Red & Black Drawings

Between 2006 and 2009 most of my artwork stuck to a pretty rigid format. These "Red & Black" drawings, as I call them (despite often including blue), were the first things I ever exhibited publicly and became popular enough to encourage me to take a few (itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie) steps towards selling work for actual money. Money I could spend in shops.

In June 2006, Flesh Design in Edinburgh put on a group exhibition titled Rouge with the theme of, um, rouge (red). I had been invited to submit work by RueFive and would be showing alongside many people I still consider friends. People like Elph, Gopherhead and Concetta Barbera.

At the time, I'd been playing around with a dip pen and figured that a few drawings using red ink might work for the show. I didn't have any "good" paper to draw on besides a big stack of smooth manila card left over from a college project so, rather than leave the house, I just used that.

The ink took to the cardboard surprisingly well - it stayed bright and didn't bleed. Further experimentation found that, if I took my time, fairly fine detail was achievable without making an almighty mess. Great. This'd work. All I needed was something to draw.

God knows where my ideas came from, but they came. They weren't good ideas, but they were better than no ideas. Six fingered hands and balaclava'd characters abounded. What I lacked in drawing ability, I made up for in patience (I still do this).

Somewhere along the way I started using acrylic paint to add black backgrounds. Doing this made the drawings really pop. It also made them kinda spooky, like goth or something. When framed (using simple wooden frames that matched the colour of the cardboard), they felt like weird comic panels and the glass made the acrylic seem completely flawless. People sometimes thought that the drawings were printed or cut outs glued to black paper.

I find this early work, like everyone finds their early work, hard to look back on. I wasn't a particularly good draughtsman and many of my ideas, with their Bunny Suicides humour (which I didn't even like at the time), make me cringe.

After the relative success of Rouge (I sold work!). I made more Red & Black drawings. Loads and loads more. I made them for shows at Analogue, Recoat, Here and Amble. I got better at making them and some (like the ones on this page and these ones), I still really like. I drew so many of the bloody things that I was scared to draw anything else. They were reliably straightforward to produce and generally well received. I covered entire walls with them. It got a bit silly.

It's been a few years since I last made any Red & Black artwork. I still have the cardboard and the pens and there's some part of me that wants to revisit them. A bigger, smarter part of me wants to leave them behind as a weird period in my life that's over now. Anyway, making an arse of the background and having to start again was always so unbelievably frustrating that my old heart probably couldn't take it.

I've put a small collection of these drawings over here: Red & Black Drawings. I will add more of my favourites whenever I get the chance.

Textexpander Search Snippets

I'm no power user, not by a long shot. Scripts, hacks, codes, plist edits and the Terminal all give me the heebies. I keep my 3D dock on the bottom and, hell, it doesn't bother me.

Despite this, I probably dabble with slightly more advanced things than the average user. I dabble with Markdown, I dabble with the occasional beta and I do know my way round a keyboard shortcut or two. I also use TextExpander. I use it loads.

In brief, TextExpander is an app that runs in the background on your computer. It allows you to set shortcuts for longer pieces of text. For example, when I type "dgw", TextExpander replaces it with "davidgalletly.com" (in my head, "dgw" means "David Galletly Website"). When I type "dgt", I get "twitter.com/davidgalletly" (David Galletly Twitter). With little effort, you can use TextExpander to remember your phone number, fix your most common typos and add today's date.

It also does much, much more, as demonstrated by MacSparky.

-

USING TEXTEXPANDER TO SEARCH

Reading Dr Drang's recent post on using TextExpander to search a site using Google made me say "hey, I do that... kinda".

I don't really like using Google to search anything other than, um, Google (as I say, I'm no power user). Maybe it's habit, or aesthetics, or ignorance, but I like native searches. Besides, the sites I most regularly search format their results in a more useful way than Google usually will (in particular, image resources such as Flickr & Dribbble).

The first snippet I made was for BBC News. I rarely search for news stories and, for a long time, I'd just type my query into Google and hit the 'news' tab. The results were never great. Upon visiting the BBC site and noticing that the search URL was pretty simple, I realised that dropping it into TextExpander and adding a fill-in field would be super easy, even for me. The result:

  • http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/?q=%filltext:name=search query%

It worked! I assigned it the abbreviation ";news" and was good to go. All I'd need to do to search BBC News was type my shortcut, type my query, hit enter twice and kablamo, there was the page. Pretty good.

Hit enter twice, though? Tsk, that's a wee bit annoying. Kinda spoils the feeling that you're performing a magic trick. There's gotta be a way to fix that. Sure there is! TextExpander can include special keys inside a snippet (Enter / Esc / Return / Tab). With a quick update, I was good to go:

  • http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/?q=%filltext:name=search query%%key:enter%

Now I just type ";newsblue tits" + enter and I've instantly searched the BBC for breaking blue tit stories. Instead of never checking the news, now it only takes me 6 keystrokes. I quickly added snippets for searching Wikipedia, Thesaurus.com, Flickr, Dribbble, Pinboard and GMail:

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%filltext:name=Search query%%key:enter%

  • http://thesaurus.com/browse/%filltext:name=search query%%key:enter%

  • http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%filltext:name=search query%%key:enter%

  • http://dribbble.com/search?q=%filltext:name=search query%%key:enter%

  • http://pinboard.in/search/?query=%filltext:name=search query%&mine=Search+Mine%key:enter%

  • https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/%filltext:name=search query%%key:enter%

So, by typing ";flicklogs" and hitting enter, I've searched Flickr for logs. Typing ";mailsatan" + enter gives me all my Satanic emails. And ";wikiwojtek", teaches me about a cigarette-smoking, beer-drinking soldier bear "Wojtek the Bear"). I recorded a wee video of my system in action:

To people who really know what they're doing, this is incredibly basic stuff. To me, though, it's really powerful. I'm gonna try Dr Drang's Google snippet on a couple of sites too but, y'know, the best thing about TextExpander is that it naturally shapes itself to how you work. Even if you're a dunce.

Withered Hand at Stirling's Old Town Jail

Stirling folks! Here's an event that might be of interest: Withered Hand, alongside Small Feet Little Toes, Conquering Animal Sound and Quickbeam is playing at the Old Town Jail tomorrow (Saturday 1st September). The gig is part of the closing party for Creative Stirling's collaborative mural project, Freedom Versions V.1. The details in full:

- - -

FREEDOM VERSIONS V.1: FINALE

Featuring: Withered Hand, Small Feet Little Toes, Conquering Animal Sound, Quickbeam
Hosted By: END OF NEIL
Venue: Old Town Jail, St. John Street, Stirling, FK8 1EA
Date / time: Saturday September 1st, 7-11pm
Tickets: £5 (available here)
More info: Freedom Versions Finale on Facebook

- - -

Creative Stirling are a great bunch - a community interest company started by Joe Hall with the intention of kicking Stirling (my hometown) up the backside by acting as a cultural hub for the city.

For, jeez, nearly a year now, I've kept in touch with Joe and, despite our schedules never quite lining up correctly to actually work on anything (if I'm even eligible as a Stirling-deserter), it's been amazing to watch the progress she and her incredibly hard working team have made. Offices, studio space, workshops, exhibitions, gigs, murals, and pop-up shops have all been launched by Creative Stirling, bringing some much needed energy to the town.

I've been meaning to talk about the project for a while and, as possibly the busiest 3 months of my life finally come to a close, I'll hopefully get a chance to do so in a little more depth soon. For more information about what's going on, check out the following:

- creativestirling.org
- Creative Stirling on Facebook
- Creative Stirling on Twitter

The gig, though. The gig. Go to the gig if you can. I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to make it along but, if you're anywhere near Stirling, go see Withered Hand (and friend-of-the-blog JMSSCT's Conquering Animal Sound). It'll be great. If you do see me, say hello.