I created an Automator workflow that extracts URLs from text, and passes them to the clipboard and to the same AppleScript we’re using above.

Wouldn’t it be neat to have our Mac automatically extract the URLs from tweets, and only save those in OmniFocus? If you, like me, use Twitter favorites as a todo list/cool-things-I-have-to-check-out list, it’s likely that you’re doing so for the links shared in your timeline. The Slightly More Complex Way: Extract URLs If you fiddle around with the AppleScript, you could also set a default context and project for new tasks, but I prefer to keep them in the inbox for a proper review. Obviously, keep in mind that OmniFocus will have to be running to receive new inbox tasks. Last, you can insert an action to archive or delete the text file. The AppleScript will take the clipboard, and make a new inbox task in OmniFocus out of it. cat $1 | textutil -convert txt -stdin -stdout -encoding UTF-8 | pbcopy The shell script will take the currently processed file, read its contents, make sure they’re encoded in UTF-8, and copy the text to the system clipboard. This cuts Mail.app out of the equation, uses Dropbox and interfaces directly with OmniFocus through AppleScript, and it allows you to keep an archive of favorite tweets as plain text files if you want to. Instead of forwarding a favorite tweet via email and have Mail.app process it as an OmniFocus task, I chose a different path: a tweet is turned into a text file, which then becomes an inbox task.

There are ways to run your own Twitter archive tool, but I decided to rely on IFTTT, which in my experience has been reliable and sufficiently fast (supposedly, Premium accounts will someday bring even faster trigger times). As an extra, I have also created a more “advanced” version that adds Automator to the mix to only extract URLs from favorite tweets. Using IFTTT, a single line of bash, Hazel, and AppleScript, I created a simple way to turn a favorite tweet into an OmniFocus task in the application’s inbox, ready for future processing. I couldn’t find a way to add favorites to OmniFocus without leveraging email as a bridge, so I built a solution myself.

In my daily “social networking workflow”, I use the “favorite” feature of Twitter as a todo list of sorts.

File and folder automator action pack