Richard Taylor

Blackbook is a useful gem that mines all your contacts from services such as gmail, aol, hotmail and yahoo.

Example:

require 'rubygems'
require 'blackbook'
aol = Blackbook.get :username => '<a href="mailto:me@aol.com">me@aol.com</a>', :password => 'whatever'
gmail = Blackbook.get :username => '<a href="mailto:me@gmail.com">me@gmail.com</a>', :password => 'whatever'
hotmail = Blackbook.get :username => '<a href="mailto:me@hotmail.com">me@hotmail.com</a>', :password => 'whatever'
yahoo = Blackbook.get :username => '<a href="mailto:me@yahoo.com">me@yahoo.com</a>', :password => 'whatever'
#contacts is an array of hashes with :name and :email keys, any other metadata
#in the contacts are added as additional key/value pairs
contacts = []
# collect unique contacts by email address into an array
(aol + gmail + hotmail + yahoo).each do |contact|
  contacts << contact unless
    contacts.detect{|c| contact[:email].downcase == c[:email].downcase }
end
# export as xml formatted text
exporter = Blackbook::Exporter::Xml.new
xml = exporter.export(contacts)
# export to VCard formatted text
exporter = Blackbook::Exporter::Vcf.new
vcards = exporter.export(contacts)

class Object
  ##
  #   @person ? @person.name : nil
  # vs
  #   @person.try(:name)
  def try(method)
    send method if respond_to? method
  end
end

Simple usage:

require 'rest_client'
resource = RestClient::Resource.new 'http://some/resource'
xml = resource.get
jpg = resource.get :accept => 'image/jpg'
resource.put File.read('my.pdf'), :content_type => 'application/pdf'
resource.delete

Working with protected resources:

protected_resource = RestClient::Resource.new 'http://protected/resource', 'user', 'password'

MacRuby is a port of the Ruby 1.9 implementation for the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector.

RubyOSA provides a bridge from Ruby to the Apple Event Manager. It allows Ruby programs to automate Mac OS X applications in the same way as AppleScript.

For example, controlling iTunes

require 'rbosa'
itunes = OSA.app('iTunes')
track = itunes.current_track
p track                     # <OSA::Itunes::FileTrack:0x1495e20>
p track.name                # "Over The Rainbow" 
p track.artist              # "Keith Jarrett" 
p track.duration            # 362.368988037109 
p track.date_added.to_s     # "2006-06-30" 
p track.enabled?            # true
# Play the selected track.
itunes.play                    
# Fade the volume.
100.times { |i| itunes.sound_volume = i; sleep 0.1 }  
# Set iChat's status message to the current track.
OSA.app('iChat').status_message = "Playing: #{track.name}"