“A list of things that you must do for every app. Most of these should be done up front; some can be put off a little bit; some can be put off a long time, but ought to be done at some point rather than put off into the indefinite future.”

(Via Domain of the Bored.)

I’d agree with all of Peter’s comments- I can’t stress point 1 enough!

“One thing that I’ve been playing with off and on for some time is a small efficient little solution for handling basic Bluetooth proximity detection, specifically for being able to perform certain actions when a cell phone or other Bluetooth device is in range of my Powerbook.”

(Via The Technocrat.)

Great article, what a brilliant idea!

Cocoa its good to be back!

(Via Manton Reece.)

Well done Manton, I can only hope that my first product will do as well as yours!

[Update] I’ve found the article I meant. It was over at allocinit.net. I found it in a slightly unusual way however, that may be of use to others. I found the site to which it linked, and then used Google to search for sites that linked to the paper using the link: prefix. Lo and behold the site I was looking for was in the first couple of hits

On the cocoa front, I’ve been working on a super-cool top secret application which I hope will be finished shortly. I’m finding switching between java and cocoa is getting easier, but it still takes me a couple of hours to really get in the zone!

I’ve also been writing a couple of cocoa tutorials, which I hope to release here shortly. I’ve been working on a tutorial for shell script Automator actions and also some notes on my experiences of creating importers for spotlight. If any body has suggestions for further tutorials let me know. I’m planning to focus on aspects I find/found hard (of which there are many).

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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