My Mouse can Program!

One of the new features in Tiger is Automator (nice demo movie included). Until now, for some reason, His Steveness hasn't demoed this much, and neither did I take the time to check out the info on it, like the rough outline for developers.

Now that I have, I'm kinda surprised. As a person who liked the general idea behind visual programming tools like SuperCard's ClickScript and Authorware, but found the execution lacking, this looks like an almost workable approach. Admittedly, it seems to follow the Daedalus Encounter-school of branching (do it right and you succeed, do it wrong and you die), but anyway, it'll be interesting to watch new clickscript implementations based on Apple's design pop up.

What's kind of disappointing is that you have to explicitly create each action as a developer, but on the other hand, it seems to support creating add-on actions for existing apps using AppleScript, so I guess we'll be able to leverage existing hooks, and many small developers will be able to enter a new market with Automator actions.

Still, AppleScript's Record feature was way cooler and easier to use, and I'd have loved if they'd found some way to allow ClickScripting based on an app's regular AppleScript dictionary.