Improved email support for Billable coming soon
One of the nice upcoming improvements in Billable 1.2 is better email support. Previous email support consisted of telling the user to use the “Mail PDF” option in the print panel. This has a few problems though:
- It uses Mail.app and Mail.app only.
- The PDF it attaches to the new mail message is named “Untitled.pdf”
- The To address isn’t autofilled.
- The subject is left blank.
In Billable 1.2 we will be using an AppleScript-based implementation to make this better. (We have to use AppleScript since you can’t pass an attachment using the mailto: protocol).
In my developer version Billable now supports Mail.app as well as Entourage, gives the PDF a nicer name, the subject line a better default (both based on the Invoice Number) and it autofills the to address field based on what you setup in the client editor.
Note, even though this is an AppleScript-based implementation it is just a normal button under the invoice view.
Anyways the main reason I’m posting this to the blog is I wanted to find out if any Billable users out there are using a desktop mail client other than Mail.app or Entourage. If you are, let me know and I’ll try my best to support your client. If know AppleScript and what to help you could also try to make an AppleScript function to satisfy your client. My scripts for Mail and Entourage are online for reference if you want to take a look at how those two are handled.
Thanks.
UPDATE: Thanks to the work of Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch we now have support for Mailsmith as well. Thanks again Jon!
Posted on: August 1, 2007 – 6:22 pm
2 Comments
I assume the attachmentpath parameter in the mailinvoice() function is a unix-style path?
Yes it’ll be unixy. Something like:
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