Automate out of this
Mac OS X Tiger shipped more than a year ago. It shipped with a technology called Automator that enables the enduser to automate things by doing drag and drop programming.
Automator uses Actions as building blocks for creating a workflow. Automator ships with a lot of actions but while there are more than 1000 Dashboard widgets for download there are only 165 Automator Actions listed on Apples download site.
Innovation dilemma?
Automator does not have the popularity of Dashboard. That seems to be the effect of being innovative. Users need time to play around with new technologies. They need to develop usage patterns. Articles, examples and tutorials help to spark interest in technologies.
Dashboard widgets got that attention for sure. It’s a consumer feature with nice visual effects and it’s easy to explain and use.
Spotlight has gotten a lot less attention but things seem to improve over the last months. But how many users are aware of Saved Searches and complex queries? How many articles are published about innovative ways to use Spotlight? We’ll see if new/improved interfaces in Leopard will further enhance the adoption of Spotlight.
Automator needs more help to get into the spotlight. And Apple seems to be totally aware of this. A dedicated website Automator.us provides tutorials, examples and links to further resources. And the most obvious way of pushing the technology is by giving it its own Apple Design Award category.
Support Automator
Automator needs the support of developers to give the technology the attention it deserves.
- Provide a AppleScript interface for your application. The broad support of AppleScript and the possibility to be the glue between applications is a big win for the whole platform. AppleScript is easily added to an Automator workflow. AppleScript may not have the nicest syntax and some may even hate it but the technology provides possibilities that are not existent on other platforms. As Web 2.0 provides interoperable/open services more Mac applications shall provide their service not only through their UI but also through an AppleScript interface.
- Build Automator Actions that trigger the most common actions of your application.
- Provide examples that show how to control your applications through AppleScript or Automator Actions.
Software Development and Automator
I’m a developer who likes automation a lot. I like to be able to run a script that builds my software, creates parts of websites, sends emails and more. Automator could be the platform for automation during software development. Automator provides the possibility to drag and drop your workflow and to execute it from the shell.
When Apple published the Design Award categories for this year I thought about a workflow that would support my Mac development efforts.
To give you an idea what could be done with Automator and the right Actions a pretty complex workflow could be:
- Check out latest version from version control system
- Build Binary
- Adopt Info.plist of binary with revison number
- Extract release notes out of version control and create release notes file. Special markers in the commit messages would be needed to identify release notes comments
- Add release notes to the binary
- Extract emails of licensed users, interested customers, … from a mail folder
- Upload file to web server
- Send email with update notification and release notes text
- Update information on download sites (resubmit software)
It would be the Shareware developer heaven 
Ruby the perfect glue?
Dave Thomas said that Ruby is the glue language that does not set. Ruby could also be a perfect replacement/addition to AppleScript. Perhaps someone (Apple?) starts such a project in the future. If there is a need for a developer please drop me a line
The other way seems to work. With Ruby Cocoa you can already use Cocoa objects in Ruby scripts.
July 12th, 2006 at 11:06 am
I couldnt agree any more, when i was trying to make Automater wait 15 seconds and play the next song in itunes it took me about 5 mins till i gave up because there wasnt any actions supplied to do that.
So i pulled up Script Editior and had it working in about 30 seconds, i dont know about you but i think apple script is eaiser then using Automater
July 12th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
A big problem with Automator is that one can easily get frustrated when a needed Action is missing. A developer could help himself by using the “Run Applescript” or “Run Shell Script” action.
An enduser will not know how to do things in AppleScript. The enduser will stop after he has spend a ton of time doing the thing with Automator. He probably will not start Automator in the future.
I think the more Actions, Examples and Tips/Tricks are available the better this situation will become. The UI of Automator will hopefully also advance in Leopard to make the process of finding actions that fit a lot easier.
I’m in luck. As a programmer I add the Actions and Scripts to Automator that I need
July 12th, 2006 at 8:34 pm
s/clue/glue/eg
I believe Automator isn’t used as much as it could be by software professionals since we’re more comfortable with scripts. Scripts tend to run in more environments than Automator, and offer more greater power. Hmm.
July 12th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
Thanks a lot for the regexp. Where is that automator action that fixes my spelling errors?
You are absolutely right about scripts. They offer a lot more power. For my part I have written a lot of ruby and shell scripts the last couple of months. One of the problem with my scripts is that I often do not take the time to refactor them so that they become more common and reusable. I often do copy an existing one and adopt the copy to fit my new needs. Everything goes well with this duplication as long as I do not have the need to fix/add something in the script (and the fact that I duplicate things drives me crazy).
The other thing is that I do not write scripts that often. I tend to forget things. I have to check the documentation to find out about the ruby date parsing API or the file tests in bash. Therefore it takes time to write them - and they have a very basic error handling.
I have three projects that use nearly the same script to build a disk image that has a license agreement. The very next step is to refactor this script to make it reusable and configureable. Maybe others would do that in the first step already.
Automator could be the platform for such reusable and configurable scripts. It provides a UI for those who probably will become Pros in the future. Automator integrates with the OS. I can select a directory, right click and start a complex workflow.
The workflow system I use on a daily basis is XCode. I cannot remember when I last wrote a Makefile. XCode does a far better job in writing this Makefile (script) behind the scenes. It’s like a UI for a very complex script. I don’t miss writing these Makefiles
I don’t think that Automator is perfect right now and I’m sure that there are a lot of problems where Automator shall not be used. But I’m sure there are also a lot of things where Automator could do a really great job.
July 13th, 2006 at 5:52 am
It would be great if Automater had like a functionality to search online through the apple.com collections that people upload.
So like the user can say search online and it will find the action needed.
But yeh the GUI needs to be fixed up massively so it is easier to use
July 17th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
There are moves afoot to add high-level application scripting support to Ruby:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyosa/
It’s not there yet, but fingers crossed. There’s also Mac::Glue for Perl and appscript for Python.
July 18th, 2006 at 7:30 am
Great. Thanks a lot for the link. I’ll have to check that out in more detail.