Confession

Ok, I need to come clean. I’ve been coveting a new MacBook Pro. This coveting has led to many many page views at apple.com.

This morning on my ritualistic viewing of specs and applications I ran across Automator.

Now I could crack the obvious joke here: “I liked this better the first time…when it was called Shell.”, but I won’t. I actually do think this is a good idea. IMNSHO this is giving the power that we linux users enjoy to the surfing-and-chat-set. And why shouldn’t they have it?

I had had a conversation with my girlfriend the other night about why I thought that if people were acclimated to the PC by way of the shell, they would be more productive. I then explained the power of the shell and associated GNU coreutils (picture her nodding…but only because she loves me) and how when I need to get something done I turn to the shell because I know that with a few deft keystrokes I can accomplish a lot of would be tedious tasks.

However most people today (in the US at least) don’t come to know computers through the shell, they have that all abstracted away from them with a graphical user interface. Automator makes sense to me in light of the above. Automator is a nod to the shell, however instead of making people learn a new interface to their computer, this gives them the power of the shell, but uses a metaphor they are accustomed to.