Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad and iPhone

Re:Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad ... by chipotle_coyote on Thursday March 23, 2017 @12:23AM (#13937359)

True, but automation on the Mac is still a lot easier just because of the system design. In about sixteen years of using OS X (er, "macOS"), I've only used AppleScript for automation when forced, usually by programs like BBEdit that came of age in AppleScript's glory days. In most cases, writing a shell (or Python or Ruby or...) script is just easier. To be fair, AppleScript can be really powerful, but it's just not a very good language.

Also, it's worth noting that Workflow is, in a lot of ways, inspired by Automator on the Mac. At this point it's better than Automator is, albeit with all the caveats forced on it by the aforementioned differences in system design, but it wouldn't require an awful lot of effort to bring Automator up to par.

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Re:Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad ... by tommorris on Thursday March 23, 2017 @05:47AM (#13938424)

Things are a lot better now that you can do OSA scripting in JavaScript. I have a few OSA-JS scripts that are in my crontab. If I had to write AS rather than JS, I wouldn't bother.

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