My Green Jar

Automator was introduced with the launch of Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), so I’m fairly late in discussing it here. However a recent post to my local Mac User Group’s mailing list got me interested. The simple question was “Is it possible to monitor a web page for changes?”.

I’m a big fan of the terminal, so I knocked together a quick shell script to check the page and mail me if anything had changed. I then thought, I’ll just run this every x minutes as a cron task. This would be fine for me, however I then began to think about less technical users- how could I package the script for them? A user on the mailing list had suggested an AppleScript, so I could have rewritten the shell script in AppleScript putting in an infinite loop to allow it to check periodically. I hate AppleScript (I’ll leave that for another post), so that option was immediately out.

Then it struck me- why don’t I create an Automator task for the action?

I had seen the sneaky option for a Shell Script Automator Action:

I thought I’d just sit down, cut and paste my script and be done before dinner…and I was!

The whole experience of creating my own Automator action was great. I referred to the Automator Programming Guide for required information, and surprisingly the whole thing took a little over an hour.

Then Automator’s only weakness became apparent. I searched high and low for a way to repeat workflows periodically. There was none in sight, and I was back to square one. I did come across the third-party Automator Loop Utility which serves the purpose.

In short I like Automator a lot. The ease of development of custom actions is fantastic and the developer’s documentation is well-writen (as always). But I refuse to love Automator until it will repeat my tasks automatically.

Technorati Tags:
OS X, Shell Script, Automator

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Apple, OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.