One piece of a larger puzzle I’m trying to solve currently, was how to add a given URL to my Apple “Reading List” that is stored in iCloud and synced across all my OS X and iOS devices. More specifically, I wanted to add URLs to the list from my mac running Mavericks (10.9). I had a quick look at the Cocoa APIs and couldn’t see anything in OS X to do this. (iOS has an API to do it from Cocoa-land it seems though.)

I figured Safari.app was the key to getting this done on OS X, given it has the ability itself to add the current page to the reading list, either via a keyboard command, a menu item, or a button in the address bar. One quick mental leap later, and I was wondering if the engineers at Apple had been nice enough to expose that via Applescript for me to take advantage of.

One quick stop in “Script Editor.app” later, and I had the Applescript dictionary open for Safari.app. Lo and behold, there is rather handily an Applescript command called “add reading list item”, which does exactly what I want. It has a few different options you can call it with, depending on whether you want Safari to go populate the title & preview text, or if you want to specify it yourself at save-time.

As I want to be able to call this from multiple runtimes, I’ve chosen to save it as an executable, which leans on osascript to run the actual Applescript. And here it is:

#!/usr/bin/env osascript

on run argv
    if (count of argv) > 0
        tell app "Safari" to add reading list item (item 1 of argv as text)
    end if
end run

Save it as whatever you want (eg. add_to_reading_list), make it executable (chmod +x add_to_reading_list), and then run it with the URL you want saving as the first argument.

$ add_to_reading_list "http://caius.name/"
$ add_to_reading_list "http://google.com/"
# … etc …

(Adding support for specifying preview text and title is left as an exercise for the reader!)

Have fun reading later!