Feb 15
My unix roots often make me jump to shell/ruby/perl when AppleScript is a better choice, especially with the Automator.
I wanted to automatically download the WebKit nightly build for testing, and instead of opening downloadwebkit.sh to wget, open, cp -r, etc I remembered to open up automator and build a simple workflow.
Many developers hate UIs and just want to vi a file and start typing. This is a good example of a useful UI as it helps you find the API that is available (much nicer than grep) and you can drop down into AppleScript too.
February 16th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Don’t you have to be logged in for Automator to do its work? I wanted to do the same thing you did, but I created a Launchd script to accomplish it, instead. Once I installed it, it will run even if the power goes out and the machine reboots and is sitting at the login screen.
Granted, the Automator way is far easier than what I did… Launchd is not fun. I much prefer cron, but Apple is moving away from it.