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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

> Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade)

Two decades! It will be 20 this April.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS)

Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts.

But you’re right, OpenClaw seems to be another fad being used mostly by “influencers” and “thought leaders” to show how awesome and productive they are at… Writing blog posts about being productive. It’s the LinkedInification of the web. What matters is the signal that you use the tool, not that it does something truly useful.

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>Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts.

It's been almost five years since Apple announced Shortcuts for macOS and the start of the "multi-year transition" from Automator, but I feel like Shortcuts for macOS has not gotten any better in that time.

I tried making a very simple Shortcut the other week and gave up after over 2 hours. I even resorted to reading the docs, which revealed absolutely nothing.

I have tried several times to automate tasks with it and have failed all but one time, but that only worked briefly. It stopped working a few hours later. I resolved to never waste time on that POS again.

And before that we already had AppleScript.

And interestingly due to some very clever integrations[0], sending Apple Events (the underlying tech for the actual IPC communication done with AppleScript) is very easy to do in Swift. Easier than in AppleScript actually!

It’s a shame most apps do not support Apple Events anymore, though.

An example of use: https://github.com/Frizlab/apple-music-to-slack/blob/90964bb...

[0] https://github.com/tingraldi/SwiftScripting

Man, I can't believe it's been that long. I remember buying Photoshop plugins for Automator that did a bunch of resizing/refinements/watermarking.

I'm guessing a lot of that is built in to photoshop now, but I have always been surprised how few people seemed to use it with how much it could do.

> that is Shortcuts.

I'm convinced apple doesn't want people doing general purpose computing on their apple devices.

they even want developers going through their gauntlet of apple-invented languages*.

[*] or NeXT

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