How to link to a file or web site in the Notes field of Life Balance

Submitted by cewhite on Tue, 02/01/2011 - 16:28

Recently we've had a number of people write in to ask if you can link a file to the notes field of Life Balance. Yes, you can link to a document, or a web page, or even a "mailto" link.

You need the latest version of Life Balance. You also need to copy the URL for the file to the notes. You can then work with the handy link once it is in notes. On Mac you have to Command Click, but on Windows, you can just click on it. We understand that this feature is perhaps not as obvious as it ought to be. Nevertheless, you can do this, and it actually does work! 

Examples of URLs that work are:

Also on the Mac side of things, you can use Applescript and Automator along with this feature, there is an example Applescript in our documentation that does this.

For example, here is a script that copies the URLs of the selected items in the Finder to the notes field of the selected task in Life Balance:

tell application "Finder"
  set theSelection to selection
  set theURLs to ""
  repeat with theItem in theSelection
    set theURLs to theURLs & "\n" & (URL of theItem)
  end repeat
end tell
tell application "Life Balance"
  tell (selected task of document 1)
    set notes to notes & theURLs
  end tell
end tell

Once you've copied a URL to the Life Balance notes, a command-click on the URL will open the corresponding file. The same trick works with web sites:

tell application "Safari"
  set theURL to URL of document 1
end tell
tell application "Life Balance"
  tell (selected task of document 1)
    set notes to notes & "\n" & theURL
  end tell
end tell

Here are some more details on how to make that file: URL, because it's very useful and rather obscure.

What you want is the following format:

file:///Users/your user name/path to the file

Note that there are THREE slashes at the beginning; two of them are for the file:// construction, and the third indicates the top of your hard drive.

As for the %20 thingy, that's because you can't have spaces (and some other characters) in a URL, so %20 means "insert space here".

Give it try to see if this clever technique extends your use of Life Balance even further! 

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Copyright @ 2011, Catherine E. White, permission is granted for this article to be redistributed and shared with others in its entirety as long as links and attribution are maintained. Catherine E. White is president of Llamagraphics, Inc., developer of Life Balance™ software for Mac OS X, Windows, Palm OS and iPhone. Life Balance provides a structure for your goals, projects and tasks that is priority driven, so you can to make better decisions about how to use your discretionary time. To learn more, please visit http://www.llamagraphics.com/

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Comments

Works for launching an application too!

Submitted by Fillip on Wed, 08/03/2011 - 02:29.

This is fantastic! I've been using OminOutliner and this is the one big difference between LB and OO was the ability to attach a file, link, and now an app.

Here's how I do it on my mac running LB v5.3 (9), the demo I downloaded from the Llamagraphics site:

Let's say I want to launch Pages. Then here's how you would write it out;

file:///Applications/iWork%20'09/Pages.app

and of course I always hit save before using the link (Mac: command - click)

Some notes:

1. Pages is in a folder that's in the Applications (the iWork '09 folder), most Applications will follow the following:

using iTunes.app as an example:
file:///Applications/iTunes.app

2. Remember what Catherine wrote above when you have a 'space' in your file name you have to write: %20 in place of that space as in the above example broken down:

iWork '09 now becomes iWork%20'09

And that my fellow LBers is how we can now have the ability to launch an App.

Many thanks to Catherine and the staff of Llamagraphics, in Japan we show appreciation with a bow... m(_ _)m

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