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how to add a hotkey for the ‘About’ menu
I often need to check version numbers of apps I’m using from the ‘About’ menu. However, unlike ‘Preferences’, ‘Hide’ and ‘Quit’, the About menu doesn’t have a default hotkey.
Normally, it’s no problem to add a menu hotkey through System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, but you can’t do that for the ‘About’ menu. That’s because the Shortcuts requires an exact menu name, and the ‘About’ menu is actually postfixed with the name of each app, so there’s no way to specify the menu universally.
However, we can solve the problem with a little AppleScript, which we can then make into a Service (via Automator) or add to a script runner like FastScripts.
The script is quite simple, but does require System Events, and that means you need to make sure that System Events itself or the app that’s going to run the script has Assistive Access allowed in System Preferences’ Privacy pane.
The raw text for the script is available from my pastebin here.
Enjoy! 🙂
applehelpwriter.com 
Xcode: wrap code in comment tags
Nov 29
Posted by philastokes
While AppleScript’s Script Editor has long had a built-in function for wrapping or unwrapping code with comment tags, for some reason this seems to be missing in Xcode.
Not to worry, nothing a bit of AppleScript and Automator can’t sort out. This will work in most text editors as well as in Xcode. Here’s what it does:
Install the Service by double-clicking on the downloaded .workflow file and clicking through the dialog boxes. When it’s installed, you can assign it whatever hotkey you want in System Preferences | Keyboard | Shortcuts.
Download Toggle Comments for Selection workflow.zip
If you want to use it for languages that have different comment tags you can adjust the code in Automator. Likewise, it would be fairly simple to have the script detect a number of different tags and respond appropriately, but here I’ve just stuck with the /* …. */ tags.
A note on usage: when uncommenting, it’s best to ensure that the selection begins at the leading forward slash and ends at the trailing forward slash (in other words that there’s no whitespace at either end of the selection). I have built in some attempt to strip leading and trailing whitespace, but an accurate selection will always be the most reliable.
Download Toggle Comments for Selection workflow.zip
Enjoy 🙂
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Posted in AppleScript, Automator, Developer, Xcode 6
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Tags: comment, comment blocks, comment tags, comments, hotkey, keyboard, keychord, shortcuts, Xcode