Mac OS X Programming: Automator?
Sunday, 8 October 2006 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daI'm noodling with Automator, investigating the best way to do some webby things on a mac. For a while last night I was a bit frustrated, as it looked like the only best way to do this was call out to a perl program. Which I've done before, in Linux; but I thought there might be more macish ways too. I'm also trying to convince myself that Automator isn't a gimmicky glitzy fake-programming tool.
I just wrote my first Automator script; it opens safari, logs into my credit-card account, and downloads all my activity in .qif format.
Most of this is thanks to OttoMate. It's a free set of four Automator actions: to click links or buttons, fill in form fields, check whether the page has certain contents, or call arbitrary javascript against a page.
The puzzling thing to me is that OttoMate is only billed as a Website Testing tool; it's a bit more than that. And it only has 200 google hits. It's not perfect, but it does the job, and well. Totally bizarre. I couldn't find any other macish tool that was better. Why is that?
If I can figure out how to share Automator scripts, I'll put up a tutorial somewhere. (So far, I've seen a lot of people sharing Automator scripts by doing a screen shot of their code. Screwy!)
I just wrote my first Automator script; it opens safari, logs into my credit-card account, and downloads all my activity in .qif format.
Most of this is thanks to OttoMate. It's a free set of four Automator actions: to click links or buttons, fill in form fields, check whether the page has certain contents, or call arbitrary javascript against a page.
The puzzling thing to me is that OttoMate is only billed as a Website Testing tool; it's a bit more than that. And it only has 200 google hits. It's not perfect, but it does the job, and well. Totally bizarre. I couldn't find any other macish tool that was better. Why is that?
If I can figure out how to share Automator scripts, I'll put up a tutorial somewhere. (So far, I've seen a lot of people sharing Automator scripts by doing a screen shot of their code. Screwy!)
