Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

412
CHAPTER 23 MAC OS X AUTOMATION WITH AUTOMATOR AND APPLESCRIPT
Finally, drag a Start Screen Saver action from the Utilities group, and click Run. Pretty cool,
right? You can save your workflow and open it in Automator any time, or you can save it as
application, as shown in Figure 23-14. Now you can keep it in the Dock and, whenever you
want, launch a new screen saver depending on your mood.
Figure 23-14. Saving an Automator workflow as an application
TIP You can drag the title of your newly minted application directly from the Automator window’s
title bar into the Dock.
When you’re running an Automator workflow in Automator, it’s pretty obvious what’s happening.
You can watch each action execute sequentially, examine the results, and watch the
actions add messages to Automator’s log.
When Automator is closed and you launch your application from the Dock, it’s not immediately
obvious that anything is happening. Since it takes a while to download all those images,
it would be nice to have a status report. Fortunately, the Automator runtime does this for you
automatically. When you run your new application, check out the status (and Cancel button) in
the menu bar, as shown in Figure 23-15.
Figure 23-15. Automator workflow status in the menu bar
How Automator Works
Automator actions are actually tiny applications. They can be written as shell scripts, or they can
be full-fledged programs written in Objective-C (and by extension, plain C). However, most
Automator actions don’t do very much, instead deferring to existing applications on the system.
Automator doesn’t have any kind of magical ability to control other applications. It simply
puts a convenient UI on an existing technology, the Mac OS X Open Scripting Architecture
(OSA). You don’t need to use Automator to take advantage of the OSA. You can also address it
in its native language: AppleScript.