December 29, 2007 – 11:55 am
How many Mac users find themselves doing the same task over and over in apps like iPhoto, Mail, or Finder and has thought to themselves, “I wish I could just tell the Mac how to do this, and let it do it”? For anyone who has thought that, the good news is that Mac OS X comes with AppleScript and Automator, a built-in automation language and visual automation tool, respectively.
Over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, a guy by the name of Cory Bohon has started posting very simple tutorials on learning AppleScript, and the Automator, sort of a drag-and-drop analogy to AppleScript. For anyone interested in beginning to automate their Mac, here is a list of some of his most recent posts on the subject:
December 19, 2007 – 1:12 pm
The sister of a friend of mine recently bought a MacBook – her first Mac after years of toiling on a PC. As a fellow recent Mac convert, my congratulations goes out to her. My congratulations, and also my most sincere dumbfounded shock and irritation. I still shake my head in awe, and curse under my breath every time I think about what she did next.
She plunked down $399 for a copy of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac. $399! I tried to stop her. I pleaded with her not to do it.
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December 16, 2007 – 6:15 pm
UPDATE December 16: I noticed the link in this article was broken and fixed it. Oops!
As an occasional programmer, one of the most irritating things to discover is that a function that I’ve spent days on, and ended up with 250 lines of code to perform, could have been done in five minutes with 3 lines of code. I hate discovering that! Nevertheless, I begrudgingly accept that it was a good learning experience, and at least I’ll know in the future.
Such was the case with a post that I had been writing on and off for the last couple of weeks concerning making a bakup of your Boot Camp Windows XP installation on your Mac. I had an entire tutorial typed up, lots of cool pictures to add, and just had to make a few more additions before it was ready to publish.
Then I came across a short discussion that explained a much simpler way to do the same thing.
ARGH! So much easier! No screwing around in Windows, itself! Why didn’t I find this before?!? I spent two weeks working on a complicated post, and put off writing any more Geek Doses until I was done (which I’m sure all of my faithful readers [both of them] missed terribly), and I could have spent five minutes linking to that article.
Hmmph. Oh well. At least I’ll know in the future…
So, without further ado (or whining and moaning), here is a very useful discussion that explains how to back up an image of your Boot Camp Windows partition all from the comfort and safety of Mac OS X.
Hopefully someone besides me (and the folks in the discussion) get some use out of this. I wish I had found this before I had to reinstall Windows XP from scratch again.