Hampton Catlin

Hampton Catlin is the inventor of Sass, a CSS generating language, and the Haml markup language

He is the original creator of Wikipedia Mobile (m.wikipedia.org) and is also the creator of several successful iPhone applications including Dictionary!

Hampton is currently building crazy new technologies to mobilize the web at Moovweb.

Macruby Clipboard / Pasteboard

I am currently working on a macruby app for OS X and I needed to read off the Clipboard (aka “Pasteboard” in OS X parlance). At first, I started reading the nutty Cocoa native implementation… but it did way more than I needed and was far more complex than I wanted. I found this little gem though and thought I’d share it with you. We can do it easily in the Ruby half of macruby!

IO.popen('pbpaste') do |clipboard|
          puts clipboard.read
        end

If you want to write:

IO.popen('pbcopy', 'w').print "Text to go on clipboard"

Simplez!

Comments

Nov 2, 2010

Carl said...

I ended up doing the equivalent thing in Python. I had a bunch of crazy Carbon imports, but it turned out to be simpler to just use a process. One of things about this is though that in earlier versions of OS X the pb-utils didn't support Unicode, so you really did have to go through all that crap with Carbon and whatnot. Nowadays though pretty much everything is UTF-8, so the problem has solved itself.