KIT: Some Things You Can’t Do

I just added this to the KIT FAQ. A frequent request is to have the ability to drag email messages from Mail or events from iCal to KIT. Unfortunately, this can’t be done, because neither Mail nor iCal put anything on the clipboard for other applications to use.

Clipboard viewer screenshot showing super-secret Mail drag

If you use Entourage, you can drag emails and events to KIT because it does put some usable data on the dragging clipboard. You can drag the text of an email from Mail, but this isn’t quite as convenient.

7 Responses to “KIT: Some Things You Can’t Do”

  1. Rory Says:

    With Mail is the contents of the clipboard not a path to the message file? Ever since Tiger shipped Mail has stored all its messages a separate files, they are plain text and easily decipherable.

  2. Steve Harris Says:

    Unfortunately, the pasteboard data only gives the path to the .mbox file (or .imapmbox in the above screenshot), not the actual message.

  3. Rory Says:

    That’s a pain, I wonder how Mail knows which message you’re dragging if that’s all that’s on there.

  4. Steve Harris Says:

    They probably maintain some array of internal objects. I do the same in my apps, but at least make alternate formats available for the rest of the world.

  5. David Masters Says:

    One possible approach: as soon as you receive the drag message, call an AppleScript (or use AppleEvents) to ask Mail.app for the selected message(s). You should be able to get all the information you need from there.

  6. Steve Harris Says:

    That would work, except it’s possible to drag messages without them being selected.

  7. TommyW Says:

    I think you’re due a blog entry called Kit – things you can do…

    I’ve been pretty impressed using KIT for a couple of weeks now. You pay a lot of attention to how people work, it seems to me.

    Simple little things like a very easy keyboard shortcut in Services: Shift-Cmd-K which can lift an iTunes track straight into KIT. Or anything else it seems to me.

    Simple things like recognising an URL in the clipboard and when you choose New Web Archive, it automatically pastes it in.

    There’s not a lot of buttons or things to explore but what’s there works really smoothly and integrates into my work very well indeed.

    I use the Comments fields for my own list of Tags I use but proper tagging would be nice…