Even Better Backpack and Quicksilver Integration

The latest backpack todo script for quicksilver can be found here. The advanced version can be found here.

I’ve been using the Backpack plugin for Quicksilver to post list items to pages on my backpack account. The problem is there were just too many steps for this when I was working with text that I copied from an email or somewhere else, or that I copied from another Backpack page and wanted to move to a different list.

The problem lies in the fact that the Backpack plugin uses the email functionality to send items to the pages, and therefore todos must have the the string “todo: ” in front of them or they will just be posted as notes.

So I’d select some text, hit Command-Esc to get it into Quicksilver, and then have to hit period to edit the text, up arrow to move the cursor to the beginning of the text, and then type “todo: ” before hitting tab, selecting “Email Directly…” and then hitting tab again and selecting my backpack page.

So I did some more digging in the API and found commands to create the todos directly, and turned this into an AppleScript. Now the same workflow as above involves selecting the text, hitting Command-Esc, hitting tab, typing the name of the script, and hitting return. It doesn’t take that much less time, but it is much easier to get into muscle memory to require less thinking.

So here’s a sample of the new script. You’ll need to save one for each page you want to use it for, and put it in the ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions folder like we did with the ones in the previous article. You’ll need to replace YOURAPIKEY with the key from your Backpack account, YOURUSERNAME with your backpack username, and PAGENUMBER with the number of your Backpack page.

To get the backpack page number, navigate to the page and look in the address bar. The url for the page will be something like http://fitzage.backpackit.com/page/1018734, with that number at the end being the number you’ll want to use.

I now have a much smoother Quicksilver to Backpack workflow. I’ll keep looking at the API and see if there are any other ways for me to whittle things down.