Now I have stuff hooked up to function keys that use Automator/AppleScript/Bourne shell every day as massive time savers. I think the magic is in discovering how to bridge from one programming environment to another. This is all dead cool and based on demos that Sal Soghoian did back in 2003 at WWDC.

That then opened MS Word and pasted the text in. If you are systematic about the design of those scripts it can be really useful.Ībout 12 years ago, I wrote a book on Metadata quality and included a few tutorials based on MacOS showing how to run a shell script to generate some text, then call AppleScript from the shell using a command line tool that runs AppleScripts. Even saving an AppleScript as an app and calling that is sometimes necessary. You sometimes need to get a bit sneaky and write a shell script and call that from Automator or write an AppleScript and call that. Automator is a way into this workflow and job control as a learning exercise although it is not always obvious how to solve a problem. Way back in the past, I used to write big shell scripts on UNIX systems. One liners are probably somewhat limited but with a bit of extra work it is really useful. You can get so much productivity leverage in return for quite modest amounts of programming.

Using automator mac