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.
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OS X, Shell Script, Automator