Tag Archives: Mail

Things to Merlin – Transfer selected todos to Merlin on another mac

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We have posted information for transferring activities from Merlin to Things and todos from Things to Merlin. Mentioned approaches require both applications (Merlin and Things) to be installed on the same mac.

But… how to proceed if you want to transfer your data to another Mac where you may have installed Merlin, or when wanting to forward to a PM using Merlin? By a similar approach.

Just use another AppleScript we specifically wrote, which reads the selected todos from Things and writes in a Merlin XML file, which you can open in Merlin by drag&drop. For an easy file transfer, the script creates an email message and attaches the Merlin file.  Cool, isn’t?

Installation:

  • Just download the applescript
  • Expand the zip archive
  • Install the contained AppleScripts into the ‘Things Scripts’ directory
    /Users/[your user name]/Library/Containers/com.culturedcode.things/Data/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/Things Scripts/
  • Restart your Things

Preparation:

    Work in Things. Create todos in Things and name them. Add on those todos, if required, due dates, tags, notes and may click the todos to define that they are completed

Workflow:

  1. Start your Things and view your todos
  2. Select the todos to be transferred
  3. Call the script “Things > Mail > Merlin” from the scripts menu of Things
  4. Enter the email address of the recipient in the mail message which is automatically created in Mail.app and contains a Merlin-XML file
  5. Send the mail message.
  6. As the recipient of this mail… Drag the XML file as displayed in the email message onto the activities area of an opened Merlin project.

Result:

    The todos will be inserted as activities in the Merlin project.

Merlin – attaching emails onto project structures

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As a project manager working with Merlin I would like to know if there are any quick and easy means of adding emails as attachments onto my project plans?  I am using Apple’s standard Mail.app on a contemporary Mac OS X version.

Sure, just drag and drop emails from Mail directly onto activities of your Merlin project. Merlin will insert them as elements and list them in the according elements area as file elements. Should you want to read the contents of this email message later on, just select it in the elements area, and use the inspector to ‘open’ it again in Mail.app. It’s as simple as that.

Merlin: Applescript sending an activity list to assigned resources

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AppleScriptWe receive from time to time the question, whether Merlin can send an email to the assigned resources and ask them for an update on their activities.

The honest answer to this is yes and no.  Yes, you can create a new report (‘next due activities’ for example), select an appropriate template, select in its options a specific resource in order to see only its activities listed,  and send this report by email…

But, no, you cannot expect Merlin to automatically address this created email to the selected resource putting its address in the “To” field.

Merlin 2.7 has not been specified to do this automatically.

If you never the less, really need this functionality,  you will find here a sample script we have created. It is based on the AppleScript sample Apple delivers for scripting the Mail.app and contains a Merlin part.

The script in the ‘Merlin part’ shows  a dialogue with the available project resources for you to select one. It collects then the titles and planned start dates of the assignments for this resource and forwards this information to the email creating ‘Mail.app scripting part.

Enjoy 🙂

Note: You may put it into your “SendToMenu” folder and have it always available over Merlin’s File > Send To

Update: Our originally posted script won’t go deeper than into level 1 of the activities, if you like you may use this one instead, expecting you to have previously select all project activities.