I want a small Applescript or Automator function to do one thing, very simply. I want to be able to drop a folder full of images on a workflow and have it generate one page of HTML per image, each one linking to the next, all in the same folder. Easy peasy. I don’t want to have to run a fucking shell script or remember how to program in Perl; this is 2012 and I should be able to use the tools supplied to build my own standalone app.
I spent about three hours this afternoon looking for a script I could hack apart, an automator function I could repurpose, or a forum explanation that I could start with. I had no success. Apple seems to have deprecated their support for Automator and Applescript (go look for it on their site right now; I’ll wait) to the point where all I can find are 4-year-old third party sites focused on scripting iTunes playlists.
God, I hate it when I can’t figure something like this out.
Update: As noted below, Jason is on the case. It’s a Ruby executable script available here.
Bill,
I currently do something pretty similar to this on my website: http://www.dailydoog.com/bookshelf. I have a public bookshelf stored within Google Books that I can iterate over programmatically via a json feed (still working out a bug or two). You could do the same thing with the picasa data api:https://developers.google.com/picasa-web/. I’m not sure if that suites your needs at all, but let me know.
Challenge accepted: https://gist.github.com/2926224
I know you said you didn’t want to have to run a shell-script, so I tried to make this as painless as possible. If your shell-script’s extension is “.command” you can actually just double-click it in finder, thus you shouldn’t have to deal with the terminal to run this (even though it technically is a shell script… a Ruby script, in fact). Oh, and you might need to dip into the terminal to set the permissions on the script (chmod) to make it executable, but you could technically do that from the finder too.
I think I might be able to do one better and incorporate this into an Automator workflow (maybe as a “folder action” or as a “service”). But I haven’t tried that yet.
Let me know if this fails horribly or … works wonderfully.
Oh, and I just saw a talk yesterday given by Sal Soghoian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal_Soghoian). He was talking about how GateKeeper will be affecting automation going forward, so I’m pretty sure Automator and Applescript aren’t dead. Sal works on those things and he was demonstrating their usage on Mountain Lion.