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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Given that Apple axed the position in charge of Mac automation tech (AppleScript, Automator, System Services, Apple Events, etc) last November, I can't help being pessimistic. Updates to products in the iWork suite repeatedly dumbed down their scripting support, and it's pretty clearly not been a priority for Apple in a long while.

Some background and commentary on Sal Soghoian's website. Until recently he was Apple's Product Manager of Automation Technologies: http://macosxautomation.com/about.html

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"I hear you no longer work for Apple; is that true? A. Correct. I joined Apple in January of 1997, almost twenty years ago, because of my profound belief that “the power of the computer should reside in the hands of the one using it.” That credo remains my truth to this day. Recently, I was informed that my position as Product Manager of Automation Technologies was eliminated for business reasons. Consequently, I am no longer employed by Apple Inc. But, I still believe my credo to be as true today as ever."

Wow.

What's so "wow" about this ? This happens every second of every day across companies. People are always made redundant for business reasons e.g. restructures, strategic realignments etc.

It's definitely not unique for Apple which recently has seen them do a purge of areas they no longer want to be in e.g. Displays, Wifi routers.

He spent 20 years building technology to empower users, and Apple decided that user empowerment is an an area they no longer want to be in. That's wow a new era in computing, that is all in on changing users into mere consumers

They didn't decide that. They decided this particular guy was not necessarily the guy to do that. You don't just go and buy the best automation app on the marketplace because you don't like automation - you do it to bring in new blood and a new perspective.

This is all just speculation. We don't know anything. But it's possible that there was a difference in opinion about what sort of user to target.

Courting power users used to be much more popular than it is today. It seems that today all large tech companies target IT professionals and consumers with a completely separate set of offerings. There's very little in between any more. On the consumer side they go for ultimate scale because nothing else moves the needle for them.

It wouldn't surprise me if Apple had decided to deprecate everything that isn't accessible to all consumers, which would have frustrated someone who has worked for decades to let power users automate tasks in ways that the average consumer never would.

As I said, all pure speculation for our entertainment :-)

The quote implies that Apple left him in the dust after 20 years, but if you look at careful phrasing it leaves open that Apple offered him an alternative position.

I agree. I doubt it is as black and white as people have interpreted. I suspect it was more along the lines of "we want to take a different approach to _automation_, are you with us or not?"

Unless of course they axed it because they knew this was coming and want it to take its place

Workflow is iOS-only and not a replacement for automation on the Mac.

Yet

True, but automation on the Mac is still a lot easier just because of the system design. In about sixteen years of using OS X (er, "macOS"), I've only used AppleScript for automation when forced, usually by programs like BBEdit that came of age in AppleScript's glory days. In most cases, writing a shell (or Python or Ruby or...) script is just easier. To be fair, AppleScript can be really powerful, but it's just not a very good language.

Also, it's worth noting that Workflow is, in a lot of ways, inspired by Automator on the Mac. At this point it's better than Automator is, albeit with all the caveats forced on it by the aforementioned differences in system design, but it wouldn't require an awful lot of effort to bring Automator up to par.

Things are a lot better now that you can do OSA scripting in JavaScript. I have a few OSA-JS scripts that are in my crontab. If I had to write AS rather than JS, I wouldn't bother.

Sal was a good friend and powerful advocate at Apple for many years.

Not many folks know he's also a fantastic jazz musician. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal_Soghoian)

> AppleScript, Automator, System Services, Apple Events

It was a mercy killing. AppleScript and Automator had become too complicated and obscure to be worthwhile anymore.

Simple stuff in Workflow basically looks like Automator, and advanced stuff in Workflow becomes inscrutable wizardy[1] even faster than AppleScript.

Workflow's advantages are that it A) covers the whole gamut of simple to insane with a single product, and B) has a sharing gallery so you can easily use someone else's magic without understanding it.

Maybe Apple killed the automation position because they were planning to replace it with Workflow, but do you expect them to backport the whole thing onto the Mac? In which case, are they going to actually maintain the user-submitted workflow gallery that makes it useful? Will it be a generally available API, or do they lock it down and use this as a stick to make people stop leaving the Mac App Store? I just don't have an easy time being optimistic about this, given where their priorities lie lately.

[1] Parse a Spotify response as a dictionary: https://workflow.is/workflows/1da14413405c4dcaa83904c2fe5cc3...

Nope. I'm not a coder. I use Automator for loads of things.

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