Why is there no OS X Automator clone for Linux? (was: Serious OO/Debian problem...)

Jason Spiro jasonspiro4-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Fri Jul 14 01:05:45 UTC 2006


On 7/13/06, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 7/13/06, Jason Spiro <jasonspiro4-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > There hasn't been much innovation in the word processing field
> > recently, so in almost all cases, any word processor is fine.
>
> The same is true for most of these sorts of applications.
>
> The *real* innovations that *could* come in are the ones that they
> used to have back in the days when Amiga apps were programmable using
> AREXX.  I had thought that GNOME and KDE were *supposed* to be about
> this; about giving you the capability to write scripts that would
> interface with and control the applications.  I'm not sure the KDE
> folk ever quite had that in mind, and GNOME lost that when they ceased
> to conclude that they absolutely needed scripting at the root and that
> Guile wasn't paramount...

I think a nice innovation would be including (Flash-based?)
interactive tutorials with each app, just like modern 3-D games come
with tutorials.

But as for your idea...

My brother wishes there was something like Apple Automator for Linux.
(Automator is a scripting tool that now comes with Mac OS X which is
extremely easy to learn. It is far easier to use than AppleScript
because you just chain together a series of pre-made "actions" and set
a few parameters for each action, often using drop-down lists. Look up
Automator on Wikipedia for more information.)

We looked DCOP on Freshmeat but all we found was kdcop, which is not
quite a drag-and-drop scripting tool. :-)

OTOH, is OpenOffice's support for Visual Basic for Applications not a
start at scriptability?

Jason

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