cliff.wootton

I love this kind of stuff.  You can get so much productivity leverage in return for quite modest amounts of programming. One liners are probably somewhat limited but with a bit of extra work it is really useful.

Way back in the past, I used to write big shell scripts on UNIX systems.  Automator is a way into this workflow and job control as a learning exercise although it is not always obvious how to solve a problem.  You sometimes need to get a bit sneaky and write a shell script and call that from Automator or write an AppleScript and call that.  Even saving an AppleScript as an app and calling that is sometimes necessary.  If you are systematic about the design of those scripts it can be really useful.

About 12 years ago, I wrote a book on Metadata quality and included a few tutorials based on MacOS showing how to run a shell script to generate some text, then call AppleScript from the shell using a command line tool that runs AppleScripts.  That then opened MS Word and pasted the text in.  It's there as a complete worked example. This is all dead cool and based on demos that Sal Soghoian did back in 2003 at WWDC.  I think the magic is in discovering how to bridge from one programming environment to another.  

Now I have stuff hooked up to function keys that use Automator/AppleScript/Bourne shell every day as massive time savers.  I'm even running an Agile backlog task manager directly in the Finder for small projects using Automator scripts (I don't need the distributed and workgroup capabilities of Trello for these projects).

Earlier, (probably around MacOS 10.4), I was hooking up AppleScripts to Mail Client rules and augmenting the mail filtering processes to deal with spam in ways the mail client rules couldn't.  It was a bit buggy so I deprecated that method but it is definitely worth trying again in Mojave perhaps using Automator.  

Maybe another up to date book on the topic would be helpful but would anyone buy it?

These Synology NAS devices are just so useful.  Even more so because they all run the same OS (DSM).  With 4TB drives becoming really inexpensive these days, you can get a lot of TB readily accessible for quite a modest cost.  Upgrading to larger capacities is easy by swopping the drives out one and replacing them with bigger ones as you can afford them.  If you can afford to buy a bigger chassis with more slots, you can run with only a few of them filled to start with.

I had a small spare 4 bay DS414 (and this would work with any Synology NAS) and used it to set up a local DNS, web server with PHP 7, Mariah DB with AFP & SMB file sharing and use it as a Web Site development box.  With the web content volume mounted on my desktop I can edit files as if they were locally stored and just hit refresh on my web browser as soon as I finish an edit. This really speeds up web development a lot because there is now no need to upload file to a web server for testing.  I got pretty good performance out of my DS414 after I tuned the Mariah DB config parameters.  The performance is on a par with a web hosted service from a major web provider.

It is just a fantastically well put together combination with lots of software add ons available from Synology and also others from a community repository.

The web admin  tools front end is a lesson in how to develop a dynamic UI that works across all the browsers and still operates trouble free as far back as Safari 6.

I've migrated from a 4 bay to an 8 bay unit by just moving the physical drives across with no trouble. You must make sure they are kept in the same order but that's no big problem.  I've had two drive failures on DS 1815 units because I was using old recycled drives.  I dropped in replacement (new) drives and saw the RAID rebuild itself within a much shorter time than the Drobo units I was using before.  It's been completely trouble free since then for a couple of years.

I think it is worthwhile maxing up the memory when you deploy them.  They run faster with a decent bit of cache memory available.

The Synology NAS also runs as a brilliant Time Machine server for multiple Macs with no additional software required.

It all integrates so well with macOS running on a bunch of Mac Mini workstations.  Even if you are only using the NAS for file sharing.

I can't speak too highly of these units.  They are just magnificent.