Architosh Staff ([email protected])

6 July 2004 in development

 

Back to the Future (of) Apple: Part 1 - CocoaCard, aka, Automator

Architosh has written more foretelling articles on concepts or "possible" futures for Apple with a greater degree of accuracy than just about any other Mac site on the Net. Ranging from simple future concepts to actual prognostications about where Apple might go, these fun articles have recieved well regarded feedback and encouragement.

Sure they are just possibilities when we published them, but over time these ideas often come to fruition in one form or another. The point of saying this is not to say Apple takes other people's ideas or our ideas and runs with them. No no no! The point in saying this is that Apple is listening to its user base...and in an intelligent way.

This is huge on a certain level because some of Apple's customers understand what Apple ought to be doing better than the troops at Cupertino themselves. Let's face it, every company has a certain degree of tunnel vision and that's normal. There's nothing to be ashamed of in that. Apple's customers -- especially its longtime customers -- often have a deft intuitive sense of what the company needs to do next and it would be a major lost opportunity if Apple corporate didn't build a mechanism for capturing this information.

Regardless of what impact ours may have had, we'd like to now discuss some of our ideas and what value they may have had in shaping some of Apple's best implementations over the years.

CocoaCard

Originally described back in 2000, CocoaCard was a secondary component to what Architosh was calling iDeveloper -- a whole new strategy for energizing Mac OS X development. While Apple went on to create Xcode, a programming environment that many experienced Windows developers consider far superior to Microsoft's developer tools on various levels, the company never produced anything like what what we were calling CocoaCard until Steve Jobs described Automator at the 2004 Worldwide Developers Conference last week.

In our original description we said CocoaCard was not meant for professional programmers and scripters necessarily (that was our iDeveloper idea), but instead for end users. We said this:

CocoaCard may represent the new HyperCard for Mac OS X, targeting the consumer and the education market looking for custom solutions created in a phenomenally easy-to-learn visual environment.

What we saw last week with Automator was a truly easy-to-use interface for utilizing AppleScript technology. We also said:

Third party developers could create their own CocoaCard compatible scripting environments that extend CocoaCard's native features within a stacked card-based metaphore program

What Apple has done with Automator is extend it to third-party software developers so they can integrate their applications into the Automator workflow playground. This way end users in the consumer, educational and creative markets can hopefully construct complex interactions that save them time working with numerous third-party and Apple applications together or separately.

Automator

While the spirit of CocoaCard and Automator are similar, Apple's new Automator has the interface we couldn't truly envision at the time of CocoaCard's ideation. Notionally they are consistent but Automator eliminates coding all together. What we were interested in both iDeveloper and CocoaCard was a "visual" programming tool. We also thought that a version of iDeveloper could "teach the art and science of Macintosh programming 'visually', doing to programming what the original Macintosh did to computing in general."

Automator's interface doesn't appear to have any code view. For those Applescript jocks out there Apple is apparently saying to them that they should continue to use Applescript Studio, a different application that is tied into Apple's new Xcode professional coding environment. While Applescript should be tied deeply into Xcode, perhaps the addition of a code view for Automator would be the ideal place for more advanced Applescript scripters to do their work. If anything, the addition of a code view would facilitate the ability for Automator users to begin to learn more advanced Applescript. A similarlity between the code view in Automator and Xcode would help intermediate and intermediate-advanced AppleScripters make the leap into truly advanced application development using AppleScript in Xcode.

Closing Comments

The impact our widely read iDeveloper article series and CocoaCard discussion may have had on Apple is unknown, but one thing Apple did do which we think is important is formulate a two pronged approach to spur interests in Mac application development. Automator is an excellent addition to the other side of the Mac development coin. What would be very nice is to develop Automator in such a way that it encourages a whole new generation of Mac users to learn how to code, because over time this trend will only lead to bright things for the Mac platform.

Related Article

Back to the Future (of) Apple: Part 2 - Apple's Apple Stores

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