Jott and OmniFocus update
January 26, 2009 at 9:50 AM by Dr. Drang
Reader Erik Courtney recently informed me that my Jott to OmniFocus script had stopped working. The script scans the email that Jott sends you, grabs the bit that you dictated, and turns that into an OmniFocus task. Sometime in the past few months—after I left Jott for Dial2Do—Jott changed the format of their email and the script broke.
With Erik’s help, I was able to trace the problem. Jott’s messages now put the dictated text in the second paragraph of the message instead of the third. So the fix was to simply change Line 39 of the script from
39: set theText to paragraph 3 of theContent
to
39: set theText to paragraph 2 of theContent
The page that fully explains the script has been updated with this new information.
Scripts like this are inherently fragile, because they depend on other people continuing to do things the way they’ve done them in the past. The screen scraping program I wrote to grab the song lists from Mark Lamarr’s BBC radio shows is just as fragile; when the BBC web monkeys decide to modernize their page layout—which, apart from having XHTML break tags (<br />) instead of HTML break tags (<br>), looks like it was written by a 15-year-old web designer in 1996—my script will break and will have to be rewritten.
