I discovered that I really like Automator. I’ve always wanted to download all the PDFs in the Hayden Pioneer Biographies collection, but all the web sucking applications I’ve tried—well—suck.
Automator made short work of the task. It’s not perfect: it stumbled hard on a bad link—just failed outright, no more processing. I wish it had some sort of basic conditional that would allow parts of the workflow to fail without stopping the entire workflow. I guess that’s probably a future release (I hope).
Still, it was neat to see how easy it was to get started and run. I know Applescript would be perfect here, but I just can’t seem to figure out the language. I’m used to C# or PHP or ColdFusion or ASP—they all spurn verbosity. Applescript revels in it and my mind is just too attuned to a different approach to syntax. Maybe it’s high time I dabbled; I think I would be much more productive if I took the plunge.