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?