Professional Web Developer, Apprentice Photographer
Computers are built to perform repetitive & tedious tasks. But as users of the computers we’re never exposed to all the tools that are provided to help, and when we are the balance between familiarizing ourselves the given tool and learning to make it do what we need it to do is a larger endever then just doing the thing manually once or twice a day.
Along these lines Apple has long had the ability to script application and operating system tasks via the AppleScript language — powerful, but not the easiest thing to pick up. However, since OS X 10.4 Apple has shipped a free visual workflow tool called Automator that can do some quite powerful things with just a few clicks or drags of a mouse. Creating complex workflows via Automator still has a learning curve and takes some trial and error, but to get it to do some simple things is easy, will take you 5 minutes, and save you time every day.
Automator is a visual macro tool that allows you to string together a series actions associated with single tasks in applications like Finder, Keynote, iPhoto, Transmit & Photoshop and create workflows that you can run via the Finder, Services Menu, standalone Application [Droplet] or iCal event item. Each action takes some input [text, URL, selected files], performs a task and then passes the output onto the next item you’ve placed in the chain.
Went though a draft of this in my head as a funny Q&A with myself — 19 questions asking if I’d need the newly announced device to help me get existing work done better or if I could expect to jump in tomorrow helping clients create content for a newly introduced publishing model all answered with a simple “NO”. Followed by question 20 “will I still preorder it?” answered with a “Probably”. What I realized as I typed it up was that it all came down to work value vs. consumer value. As someone who is a somewhat recent iPhone owner and a long time Apple laptop user there was no solid work value I could find in this new type of 3G computing device but there is still plenty of consumer value as a consolidation and update of devices we’ve seen before.
Everyone loves blogs full of lists, amiright? Why not another one? I’ve been carrying around a first gen iPod Touch for a little while now and while I’m not addicted to the app store, I have tried a few games here and there and find most don’t have good mechanics or longevity and get deleted not long after I’ve got my $1.99 worths from them, but these 5 games are the real deal.
So, Steve Jobs gives us web developers a double shot today with “One More Thing” of Safari on 3.0 on Windows and a “One Last Thing” of iPhone application development being ‘web standards’ based — just a another HTML, CSS & Ajax application.
While its absolutely great that Apple is embracing web standards in this way — great on many levels not the least of which is that it allows me as a web developer a few new avenues for work opportunities — I’m still left with a bit of a feeling of unease and anxiety.
...which almost took a spill this afternoon when one of the non-magnetic other cords got caught in the arm of my chair as I rolled away from my desk.
Time to look for a bluetooth USB hub, and wireless ethernet cable. Wish me luck.