Handy iPhone and iPad Shortcuts You Should Check Out

[gwhizkids]

idk, Automator seemed like you could write complete software using just GUI and little programming tricks. I am willing to hear from others who are more experienced on the topic. I never heard of something like this on Windows or Linux.

Does Apple still ship Automator with Big Sur?

Oh, there’s no doubt Automator is powerful, just that its limitations keep it from being everything Shortcuts is.

It does still ship on Big Sur. I use it in several Keyboard Maestro macros to automate processing of invoices I receive.

 

[kc9hzn]

idk, Automator seemed like you could write complete software using just GUI and little programming tricks. I am willing to hear from others who are more experienced on the topic. I never heard of something like this on Windows or Linux.

Does Apple still ship Automator with Big Sur?

There was the Cocoa-AppleScript bridge Apple added back in Snow Leopard that allowed you to write Cocoa applications using AppleScript. I actually wrote an app back in the day that used it, because it was honestly simpler to use it than to try to use AppleScript (to control other apps) from within an Objective-C application.

For Linux/Windows, there’s definitely nothing quite like AppleScript or Automator. There’s AutoHotKey for Windows, but that’s more for GUI scripting, think something like Keyboard Maestro. (And text expansion? It seems to the the best Windows tool for that.) And Windows/Linux has shell scripting (but so does macOS), but that’s for stuff that can be controlled by the command line. There might be third party automation tools some third party applications support that add something closer to AppleScript, but I’m not aware of any in particular for either platform. macOS really is unique for its ecosystem of personal productivity tools (clipboard managers, text shortcut expanders, GTD applications, app launchers, and task automation tools [Hazel, or Automation and AppleScript for something first party]). I can’t even find one example for most of those uses on any other platform, let alone multiple, let alone multiple high quality examples.

 

[MacBH928]

There was the Cocoa-AppleScript bridge Apple added back in Snow Leopard that allowed you to write Cocoa applications using AppleScript. I actually wrote an app back in the day that used it, because it was honestly simpler to use it than to try to use AppleScript (to control other apps) from within an Objective-C application.

For Linux/Windows, there’s definitely nothing quite like AppleScript or Automator. There’s AutoHotKey for Windows, but that’s more for GUI scripting, think something like Keyboard Maestro. (And text expansion? It seems to the the best Windows tool for that.) And Windows/Linux has shell scripting (but so does macOS), but that’s for stuff that can be controlled by the command line. There might be third party automation tools some third party applications support that add something closer to AppleScript, but I’m not aware of any in particular for either platform. macOS really is unique for its ecosystem of personal productivity tools (clipboard managers, text shortcut expanders, GTD applications, app launchers, and task automation tools [Hazel, or Automation and AppleScript for something first party]). I can’t even find one example for most of those uses on any other platform, let alone multiple, let alone multiple high quality examples.

So what do they do for repetitive tasks on Windows/Linux?

 

[kc9hzn]

I legitimately don’t know. I know there are things like AutoHotKey, and, on Linux, shell scripting/emacs does get you pretty far if you spend a lot of time in the command line. And both systems do have some sort of task scheduler included. There may be the odd option or two that you just have to know about to know about.