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I’ve often thought that Automator demos well to people who haven’t seen it. It looks like magic, it’s drag-and-drop simple, and it really does have possibilities. I saw this again today, showing off a standard “download every image from the current page in Safari and then process each picture” workflow.

I have a recurring problem with Automator. Beyond demos for tasks I don’t do very often, it seems as if every time I use it, I hit a brick wall. That’s it, I even call this the Automator Brick Wall.

Maybe the brick wall will be smashed by the version in Leopard. They certainly seem to be leveraging it (or its UI) — take a look at Podcast Producer and System Image Utility in Leopard Server. I’m hopeful Automator will finally save me from doing things over and over.

I’m not sure if it is the first signed third-party application to take advantage of Mac OS X Leopard’s new code signing feature. However, it’s at least the first one I’ve seen publicly.

The release notes for Fetch 5.3 show a raft of updates for the little niceties of Leopard. Put Automator actions under the “Internet” category? Check. Prevent Time Machine backups of Fetch’s cache? Check. Support the new application level firewall (ALF)? Check. Make the appearance match Leopard’s unified style? Check. And so on.

Hm. They actually tell you what’s new in Leopard — from a Mac OS X developer perspective, anyway — in the release notes section of the ADC Reference Library.

Who would have guessed? I think I missed this for Tiger. And, AFAIK, it wasn’t available at all for any previous version of Mac OS X. ’Twas a shame, quite a shame.

(I’ve always missed John Montbriand’s old overviews of the Mac OS classic releases; they were a treasure trove, relatively speaking, of information. Even for sys admins.)

It struck me today that when running Entourage, I have two script menus. One is specific to Entourage, the other is for the optional — but handy — system-wide Script menu. Yet both have the same icon — the stylized black and white paper-rolled-into-an-S icon — in my menu bar.

The app-specific script menu was probably more common in classic Mac OS days than it is under Mac OS X. (But yet, as I type this, I noticed that MarsEdit has its own script menu, too. I think that just shows how wired into classic’s scripting Brent Simmons was — I mean, he worked on UserLand Frontier, the original scripting environment for the Mac.)

Ah, I just wish the two menus could be one and the same. If Entourage (or any other application) detected that you had the system’s Script menu enabled, it ought to just turn its own off in favor of the system menu. Or maybe the system-wide menu could show the app-specific scripts first, so that they are always in a known location (top of list, right side of menu bar), and take over the function of the application’s scripting menu. Or, they could just have two different icons, or one could be an icon while the other was text, or whatever.

Cocoatron is a suite of Automator actions for “creating and automating complex XML Processing Pipelines.”

[Via Mark Liyanage.]