Thinking like a mac (old post)

Those of you playing WoW since the latest patch have probably noticed a few of your favorite mods going through some growing pains. The most notable of which is probably Omen. Omen is a great tool but they've been having to update nearly every day (sometimes 2-3 times) because of the recent changes. Eventually Nicole and I became frustrated with this and she gave me a 'programming excersie' to write something to handle this.

My first instinct was to write a shell script to handle this, then dump it in a copy of the WoW Launcher app so it could be launched from the Dock as an actual application. This method is pretty hacky and I wanted to hand this out to some friends, and I didn't want it to be a complete hacky pile.

Enter my local Mac fanboy/oracle Dave (http://freeke.org/ffg) with a suggestion to use Mac's Automator app. Here is where my normal habits of writing some shell script on a Unix machine to handle simple tasks get called in to question. Dave's initial suggestion was to just put my shell script in an Automator, but this tool is pretty darn useful on its own. The screen shot below illustrates the simplicity of grabbing our latest mod version, unziping it, and starting wow. Something that a shell script could of course do pretty quickly, but this feels like the Mac way ;)

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I'm quite impressed with how dead simple it was to get this working, and being a Automator n00b I'm sure I am going the long way round, it I still find it quite nice. The best part is the Automator workflow can be saved as a proper 'app' which can be launched from the Dock, all this in something like 15 minutes with Automator (which brings my life total Automator usage to 30 min).

The longest part of this whole experiment was putting the icing on this workflow. Figuring out how to effectively edit mac .icns files was an interesting experience in itself. (tip: When in doubt, type 'icon' in spotlight)

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

That is the least impressive icon you've probably ever seen, but the goal of this was to have an Icon, not to get an award. Once my app had an icon the next step was packaging. This was pretty easy once I looked over the hdiutil man page and used skitch to make a quick and dirty background.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Overall thinking like a Mac (with a little help of course) has given me a fairly simple way to keep my Omen settings up to date, and hopefully it'll help out some of our Mac WoW guildies. The whole experience was interesting just in learning a bit about the 'icing' bits like custom disk images with views and backgrounds, to editing icons. The funny part is it probably took 3 times as long to get all the 'icing' on the cake than it did to bake the thing.

Maybe someday I'll get off my lazy ass and write something that takes longer to make, than to package.