My Green Jar » Apple

My Thoughts on Automator

Adam — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 22:59:13 +0000

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

Text selection on OS X kicks ass!

Adam — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 23:44:48 +0000

I’ve just found out about a really neat trick at creativebits. If you hold the option key and drag you can select a freeform area of text. Cool!

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OS X

Cool Backgrounds

Adam — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 23:46:16 +0000

I’ve just come across some cool background images courtesy of Adam Betts. I like a nice plain background, and this hits the spot for me!

New iMac Ordered

Adam — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 23:22:23 +0000

I finally stumped up the cash for a new Intel mac. I went for the 20″ model as I thought the extra screen size would come in handy. I ordered it with a gig of RAM in one Dimm and ordered more from Crucial. I threw in a Aperture too. I’d been meaning to pick up a copy for a while but couldn’t bear the thought of it running on my G4 powerBook. I’ll post a review as soon as I’ve had a chance to play.

Now the all important question- Do I install Windows or not?