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Sat, 02 Jul 2005
Custom Workflows and scriptable apps

[via inessential.com ]:

Brent is glad that I'm giving the scripting support in NetNewsWire a workout

I love hearing stuff like this. Adding scripting to an app is a little work, but it pays off hugely when people can do their own custom workflows.

I suspect that he'll be even happier when I get some time to really think about how to get Automator stuff going on my machine. At least until I start bugging him for Automator actions.

The ability to do custom cross application workflows is something that I've found really easy to do. Between Automator, AppleScript, Python, pyobjc, and appscript, there's a wealth of tools for doing this sort of thing. Back when I was an OS 9 user, I also used Quickeys to do a lot of stuff, but Quicksilver has replaced Quickeys for a lot of those tasks. I am still looking for a Quickeys like keyboard macro program, but Quickeys seems to be falling behind the times, not to mention being quite expensive. It's too bad that Buzz Bruggeman thinks that the Mac market is too small to do an ActiveWords for the Mac. Maybe that will change in the next few years. In the meantime recommendations for products in the Quickeys space are welcome.

One other scripting thing that I am doing in NetNewsWire is that I have a bunch of python scripts to convert various kinds of system admin statistics to RSS. Right now I can handle awstats, mailgraph, pflogsumm, and some mrtg output. It would be great if the authors of these tools would make it easy to get their output as RSS.

[16:18] | [computers/operating_systems/macosx] | # | TB | F | G | 8 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
One of the more novel uses of RSS I've come across has been a script, written by a friend of mine, that logs into my school's student services website and checks for new marks that may have been posted. Not so secure and a violation of the ToS, but their user interface is such a pain that it takes like 8 clicks to get at the marks view, plus a bunch of scrolling. Now, after exam time, I just stick the script in the Apache documentroot on my iBook and let NNW do its thing.
Posted by David Warde-Farley at Sun Jul 3 18:01:31 2005








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