Brad 07 Jun 05

Yeah, these widgets are great! They’re clearly getting most of the attention…compare the number of widgets posted to Apple’s site with the number of Automator scrips and Spotlight plugins.

I like Air Traffic Control, which lets you see instantly what wireless networks are within range. Tried Rabbit Radio but it didn’t work too well for me..I kept losing stations.

Carl 07 Jun 05

I think the number of automator actions is because mostly everything can be done by the average user. Where-as dashboard widgets require alot more knowledge, (html/css/javascript), not to mention designing an interface too.

What I did notice, is even though automator actions are so simple, not everyone thinks of all the possibilities. I created one not to long ago and I think the response has been pretty good, even though I couldn’t imagine anyone needing to “download” such a simple task.

I haven’t even looked at spotlight plugin’s yet so I can’t really say anything about those.

Brad 07 Jun 05

I think it’s more that the average user is never even going to look at Automator. I doubt if I’ll ever use it myself.

DaleV 07 Jun 05

RE: Automater: I NEVER thought I would use it, but we recently implemented a revised billing model for our agency, and I wanted to rename all client files to match (and to shorten names), so I built one that changed all file name components from one thing to another throught my entire system:

For instance:
Microsoft_project_name.indd
became
MSFT_project_name.indd

Now multiply that by x-hundreds of files and you can see how much I appreciated Automator that day … .

Bryan W 08 Jun 05

DaleV

I’d find it faster to do this

for file in `find /path/to/files -iname “*matchfiles*”`; do mv “$file” `echo “$file” | sed -e “s/^Microsoft_/MSFT_/g”`; done