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August 23, 2004
Apple's Automator
I missed Apple's announcement of Automator, the automation script builder coming in Tiger. Note that Microsoft's got something similar, yet (predictably) totally different and obscure-sounding called MONAD up their sleeves in Longhorn. Brian Tol wrote a thoughtful comparison here:
So what's the lesson here? Well, for starters, so-called "service-oriented architectures" aren't just for the Web or the Enterprise: they're for regular-o-end-users, too. And, if you buy that, then it's not much of a step beyond to see how the line between local and remote services is going to blur in the next few years. I can see a whole genre of Automator actions that use the "Network" in one form or another to get work done.
Automater looks really nice, especially if it's able to get outside of just the regular features of Apple's own apps. It will be nice to have a little macro that does something nifty with iPhoto, but it would be really cool to be able to use Automator's UI to, say, write macros that parse RSS feeds from different sources (in other words, to put Ben Hammersley inside Tiger). Or just to be able to build Webb's Weblog links sidebar tool visually. Would it be possible to build a "module" in Automator for the MovableType API? For the Flikr API? For web services in general, as in the current version of Flash (web services UI screenshots)? See this excellent description of what Automator might mean to developers and product designers in this article at Macscripter. It implies that Automator will be able (at least) to scrape web pages, which means it ought to be able to handle RSS feeds.
Posted by Andrew at August 23, 2004 05:55 PM
Comments
I totally missed Automater as well. Looks really really nice.
Posted by: Austin Moody at September 7, 2004 09:00 AM
You can already parse RSS streams from different sources in Safari: Just make a toolbar folder and put all the RSS streams in there you wan’t to read. Command-Klick on the folder and Safari displays all the different streams in one window.
Posted by: Halix at May 7, 2005 07:46 AM