The meat safe and the study desk

A genuine enquiry on her well being, yielded the answer “Thin and Sleepy”. What an answer!

When was the last time you enquired about someone and heard, “Oh yea, he’s at home” or “He’s watching TV”. I thought a genuine “How is he” or “How is she” meant more than a situational piece of information. I hope to see her before I lose all the hair on my head. Seriously.

With the advent of Tiger(OS X), Apple included an application called Automator with the other software bundles. Though I have seen this before, its unmistakable robot with a ‘Bazooka’ icon, it was earlier today that I decided to play around with it.

Automator can be loosely called as a drag and drop programming language. With its well designed interface it makes it easy to automate certain regular tasks like checking Mail at every logon, open iTunes to listen to your favorite playlist, or open a set of webpages that you regularly browse and many more such tasks.

Our dear robot friend, with the ‘bazooka’ is nowadays being called “otto” and I will follow suit. I learnt today that it was not a bazooka, but a pipe, representing the power of the UNIX pipeline.

In Automator, a sequence of steps needed to complete a task is called a “workflow.” In other languages or programs, these workflows might be referred to as “macros” or “scripts.” Once you open Automator, by clicking on “otto”, you can see a set of applications that are “Automator-aware”(meaning, Automator works with them), and a set of Actions corresponding to each application. Workflows are created by adding actions of particular applications to the workflow area. A simple drag and drop will do. For example, to make a periodic backup of your gargantuan music folder or valuable photos folder, simply select Finder in the applications pane and choose the “Get specified Finder items” action. Here you can add a particular folder to perform an action on(Either your music or photos folder or some other one). Now drag and drop “Copy finder items” to the workflow area. Here you can choose to copy the selected folder to the desired location. Now save the project as a workflow, or as an application(If saved as an application, it can be assigned to run on startup/login).

Saving a workflow as a plug-in allows it to be used as part of a specific program. Saving the previous workflow as an iCal plug-in makes it available to, and behave like, part of iCal. You can save plug-ins as part of other programs as well.

Here I have made available a sample workflow that will create a backup of your iPhoto library on the desktop, iPhoto library backup.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as Automator and its scope is concerned. Lots of other articles have been published explaining Automators functionality and there are several sites to even download workflows from. I hope to write a workflow that will play songs from my iPod, update the latest created playlists from my iTunes library, and play them again, as i slip into a deep slumber. Will keep you posted.

As Microsoft keeps delaying the release of Vista and along with it, the release of Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, the only other worthy competitor in the browser market, has been steadily marching ahead. There were some doubts as to whether the popularity of Firefox had reduced, but this Macworld story, says that it has not.Statistics at OneStat.com have proved that the number of Firefox users has increased in the month of June. A rise from 11.79% in May to 12.73% in June, is a considerable jump. All this at the same time that IE use has declined by 2.12% to 83.05%.

Niels Brinkman, co-founder fo OneStat.com, says “We thought that Firefox growth had slowed down. It seems it’s increasing again. That’s a little bit of a surprise to us.” OneStat.com uses real-time Web analytics to look at which broswers are being used to view Web sites and to determine their popularity across the Internet, Mr.Brinkman added.
All eyes have been on the Mozilla Foundation the last week, expecting them to release the browsers next version. Firefox 2.0 Beta 1, has been released and has some new features. The early reports are that the new build, although in Beta is pretty stable. There are some screenshots here of the beta and it does look promising. The challenge for Firefox will come in adding more features to the default browser, while still keeping the developer community interested in writing more extensions.

With its growing popularity, everyone seems to like Firefox more than IE 6, Firefox does face a huge responsibility of keeping its audience attracted. With its next version out, more features, more security and an active user community attached to it(some like me are also emotionally attached to it!), it seems like good times are here for Firefox. At least for now.