Upgrade - 154: Masters of Automation

Episode Date: August 14, 2017

From Automator to Workflow, automation can make regular users (who are definitely not programmers) more productive. This week Jason talks to Myke about why he cares about automation, and then we've got a special automation panel discussion featuring a bunch of special guests. Plus, the Upgrade Summer of Fun begins!

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 154 today's show is brought to you by squarespace pingdom and encapsula surprise my name is mike early and i'm joined by mr jason snell hi jason snell surprise mike hurley it's me jason surprise me It's a surprise Mike Hurley. Well, I wasn't supposed to be here today, but here I am. No, you're going to, this is a special episode and we have a special segment coming up at the end, but we, it's starting out like a regular upgrade and then it will become something different. We have, we have some really fun stuff over the next couple of weeks. I think people are going to enjoy and it all begins today. asked the upgrade summer of fun it is the inaugural upgrade summer of fun amazing and it kicks off on this episode there we go you are an expert at branding things i've just given us another thing to think about every year

so we're in the summer of fun uh for upgrade and it all kicks off today but whilst i think that everybody cares about this nobody cares about it because it's time for hashtag Snell talk. And we have a great question today from Jack. Jack wants to know, Jason, you have a perspective, which is quite historic with Apple. You've been around for a long time.

Not that we're saying you're old or anything. No, no, no, no. Historic perspective doesn't mean that at all. No, it doesn't mean it just,

you're a scholar. Jack wants to know what event or moment in apple's history would you say was the lowest point unlike many snell talk questions i i saw this jack tweeted this at me and um i was thinking about it so i had some time to think about it it's tough 1997 it's definitely something in 1997 but he's asking for an event or a moment what i really want to say is the one that happened 20 years ago which is at mac world expo in boston bill gates uh appeared you know via big brother like on a screen to announce that microsoft was cross-licensing patents and investing in apple and you know basically what happened was this is

apple's on its last legs and needs cash to stay afloat long enough to release the imac and basically turn their fortunes around and they and this is also Steve Jobs having that moment that a lot of people were upset by where it's like let's not worry about Microsoft Microsoft is I think at that moment we all knew in the media that Microsoft was making more money on the average Mac sold than PC sold, I think was the argument, because so many Mac users bought Office. And so we need to get over it. And a lot of Mac faithful back then were like upset about that. So I want to say that moment, but I know that behind the scenes, they were already moving on doing the iMac and really changing the company.

That was the same time that the Think Different campaign was unveiled. So I feel like Apple was already kind of turning the corner at that point. So I might instead say something like Macworld Expo in January of 1997, where Gil Emilio was on stage for a very long time saying kind of nothing. And was super boring and it was like the the the pit of apple at its low and then steve jobs came on stage and was greeted with acclaim and i kind of feel like that was the moment when apple hit bottom and started to come back the other side so i guess i would say maybe i'd go with emilio's thing because once jobs was back in the building like the fortunes started shifting for apple immediately

but certainly at the at the time not knowing what was coming next that um that macworld expo thing felt like the lowest low like are they going to make it microsoft is trying to bail them out wait is microsoft not the enemy anymore and personally professionally that came at a really tough point because that was when they merged macworld and mac user together and so we went to that boston macworld expo where that steve jobs and bill gates thing happened um none of us knew whether we would have jobs in a few weeks because um they were going to put the two magazines together. And it was literally like, we know you're going to Boston next week, so before you go, we want to let you know that you may not have a job. Bye!

And then we were sent off to cover this event, and then returned to figure out whether we would have jobs in the long run or not, which was very, so it was a very strange thing. And I had a vacation planned, so after that expo we went out to lauren flew out and we went out to to pennsylvania to visit my relatives so it was a very weird time but knowing what we know now about what happened in 98 with the imac um it's hard for me to at the time that seemed like the low but now the turnaround suggests that they were already coming back and they'll think different campaign which at the time we were like this is weird this is what they're marketing but in hindsight right that makes a lot more sense too

so so i i might say the endless gil amelio keynote instead was like the true low that makes logical sense right because steve coming out on stage is the beginning of something right that was it was the beginning that was the handoff publicly that was the the lowest point was that moment i mean to the company internally probably the lowest point was when they decided they had to bring steve back right like that was when the company was probably at its lowest right we're like well we've got nothing else we can do now except have him become the ceo again and when steve when steve took over and started killing programs and laying people off and cutting things um i think people at the time would have thought of that as a low right that apple is just steve jobs has come in with a chainsaw and he's killing this company

but now we look at it and we think no steve jobs came in with a chainsaw and saved the company and turned it around and so what seemed like a low at the time it turns out is actually that was reform they were on the upswing those those killing those products and cutting those jobs and doing whatever restructuring they had to do that saved the company so that was part of the comeback so when when was the uhired Prey cover? At what point was this? Oh, was that 97 or 96? But it was somewhere in that period, too, where 97.

It was June 97, so it was after the Emilio thing. This is that famous thing, right? And that was the beginning of that summer that led to all of this. Yeah, it's true. Yep, 97 was a crazy year. So the jobs came back. It looked like Apple was going to die. And then it sort of got saved. And then it came back on its own. And then, you know, for my personal life, that was a huge thing. Professionally, we changed jobs. We moved. Lauren changed jobs. I changed jobs. jobs we moved to marin county where we still live that was all in 97 um yeah that was a that was a really tumultuous year personally professionally and uh for for me and and for apple so 97 i i don't i don't miss it it's interesting that it's all it's 20 years ago now jack thank you for that fantastic hashtag snell talk question you can ask any question to open the show with the hashtag

snell talk and it'll go into a lovely document so we do some follow-up today jason uh first off we're gonna we were talking a little bit about some of the notification stuff that could potentially be coming uh in ios 11 with the new iphone right like right it has all these new cameras in it and stuff and guillermo um who is the the guy from brazil who's been digging into the home pod firmware stuff along with steve trout and smith that the two of them have kind of been like really finding a lot of incredible stuff he he listens to the show i assume so hi guillermo you're doing some amazing work over there because he uh tweeted to say that and to confirm a little bit more that he's found strings that

that seem to confirm that the iphone will suppress notification sounds if you're looking at it and two of them are named awareness observer and attention detected yeah yeah that's very interesting sounding right yeah because this is the i I mean, I'm reminded of like Samsung had that feature where if you looked away from a video, it would stop playing it, which is just like, no, nobody wants that. No, no, don't do that. But that, so that tech existed years ago to do this, but like Apple building this tech in and trying to find clever ways that will be helpful for people, not like, what can

we do to show off this tech? But more like now that we have this tech, what are the, some features we could do that would be helpful for people, not like what can we do to show off this tech, but more like now that we have this tech, what are some features we could do that would be helpful? And this is an interesting example that if we can detect that you're looking at your phone, that you can change behavior on the phone, knowing that, because right now it's more like they could use the sensors

to see if you've picked it up or they know that the screen is lit up. So maybe you've seen it, but maybe you're nowhere near the phone and you haven't seen it. So once you've got that ability where the phone essentially now has sensors to detect if you are in the vicinity of your phone, if you're looking at your phone, then they can change behavior. So a really good example of that would be that if you are looking at the phone

so you can see the notification you don't need to have a extra alerts go off because you saw it you know that that was all that was required and that's fascinating to think what stuff could be enabled by the you know the the this concept of awareness detection we also spoke last time about the solia apple watch and one of the things that you posed was the idea of how how would telephone calls and text messages find their way to the watch if the phone is at home and you were saying that there is a potential for them for like the carrier to be involved right right like there are these buddy plans or something where for the the other smart watcheses that have LTE,

where you kind of like attach them to your plan and it rings both devices, and so you can answer on either device. But we got some, our good friend Kyle's the Gray wrote in with an email and said that he can leave his iPhone at home and even off. And at the gym or work, his Apple Watch will let him make and receive phone calls. Now, I don't even know how that works. Yeah, it's this forwarding thing. So there is this SMS and call forwarding thing.

And I assume, if this is true the way that he's talking about it, that's probably all that you would need is just a beefed up version or an enhanced version of this because it will work over LTE. So it would work all the time. And this would be better in the sense that you would be able to have some control over it. Right. Right. So it sounds like, I mean, is it would it be surprising? that Apple may have already figured all of this stuff out with carriers and they don't need to have a special buddy plan or something because Apple already worked it out because they wanted all your devices to get text and all your devices to ring when your phone rings. So maybe this is a largely solved problem and it's just a matter of integrating, you know, putting your watch on

your data plan and letting this work over LTE. Also on last week's show we were talking about the potential of having apple's new kind of part number part character keyboard on the iphone so this is the new keyboard that's on the ipad where it has all of the special characters and the numbers on the regular letter keys and all you need to do is drag on them to make them to make them work right so you if you want to like a number one or whatever you just drag down on the queue or whatever it is i can't remember what the other top of my head and you you were saying that you didn't think that this would be something that could work on the phone but we've had of quite a few people write in to say that there was a much loved

jailbreak uh back in the day that did this and they a bunch of people sent in pictures um including jonti and julian who show that there is like this tiny little gray label or this tiny label that would fit actually i think quite nicely looking on the keys yeah i know right about this i think it looks pretty cool i i think what julian said was uh i think it could fit but whether apple wants to do it probably not but i looked at this and i thought this is the sort of thing where I don't think you could put it as the default but why not make something like that a secondary keyboard where like if you really like I know Apple it could be a third party thing but like why not have Apple make a you know a swipe keyboard a or a you know a swipe the keys keyboard

like in the iPad style available as an alternate keyboard that that would be really an interesting decision be like well not everybody's going to want to do this but it's very you can be very productive with it if you if you really get into it as a preference or just literally as another keyboard in the keyboard settings because it looks like maybe they could implement something like this. And maybe we'll see how people take to the iPad version of it. But not having to toggle between states and being able to sort of do that tap swipe gesture to get the alternate characters. I mean, I, I always have been using the what is it there's a there's a flip up that you can do to get to get quote marks that I've been doing forever and that's a great

little shortcut if you know to do it on the iphone so why not provide more of this especially if you can fit it in um at a size where it's still you know readable at least if you if you can read small type um so yeah maybe they may never do it but um it shows that it could be done and it could be okay. So, I don't know. And now iMessage syncing. So, what have we got here? So, Elizabeth wrote in to say that, you know, we were talking about this iMessage syncing last time. And then, of course, it was said that this is actually being pulled out of iOS. But, like, I think a lot of people are confused as to what this actually entails right what

elizabeth said is my message is already always are already synced between my iphone and ipad what's different about this and the answer is actually your messages don't sync between your iphone and your ipad what happens is you those messages are sent to you and they go to all your devices and this is like you said last week mike this is when you for me it's when i open my my macbook air because i only open that up you know every few weeks i don't use it very much anymore and all of these messages start to come in and a lot of times they're out of order they're like not quite right and sometimes um i had this happen yesterday where somebody was looking up a message that to show to me and they had they on their iPad and then they opened up their phone and they're like, oh, it's not here. It's like, well, why is it not here? So the idea is that the

current system is not as foolproof as you would think in terms of every device getting every message in the right order because they go on and off the network and sometimes the message doesn't go through to some of them, but it goes through to others of them i've actually had it where i've gotten a message on my watch and it hasn't shown up on my phone which is bizarre right because the watch is theoretically getting it from the phone but not the same right so with this icloud thing when they do release it in a future version of ios 11 it's not going to be in the shipping version, it sounds like. But what's different is all of those messages are being stored in iCloud and are being synced on the devices from an encrypted iCloud store. So they're all looking at the truth being in the cloud, right?

They're all looking at that and saying, how is my messages list different from that? So theoretically, when you get a message in, it will go to all those devices. But even if it doesn't go there right away, they will sync with each other and the whole archive should be all available in sync in one place. So the goal is that it will be much more consistent and searchable. And so yeah, we'll see how that works. But that's the idea is that instead of having this kind of clever hack that Apple did where every device gets a copy of the message, this is something where there's an official, like, these are your messages storehouse in the cloud somewhere. And finally, today, before we move on, we've had a bunch of people write in to let us know that, uh, carpool karaoke just, uh, premiered on Apple music. So Apple's version of the carpool

karaoke series and Will Smith was on the first episode. Um, and, uh, he talks about pineapple pizza and I, my understanding is that he is a fan. He is, he is apparently, but I haven't seen this either. But, um, but i heard from a bunch of people that yes will smith apparently came out in favor of pineapple on pizza on carpal karaoke which by the way i i saw a review of it said it was really terrible but i don't know god another one i don't know so what i've seen which i agree with like people talking to again i haven't seen the show i will say that i just haven't gotten around to watching it yet um is that the the james corden version extremely benefits from the talk show audience noises ah so the screams and the cheers and the laughter which this one does

not have and i can see that there's no laugh track no applause track would would seriously affect the feeling of the show because the the the audience going crazy over it gives it a feeling of being special yeah yeah no that that's that's and then so it ends up feeling like it's uh in a vacuum yeah i kind of canned and i bet really awkward feeling but again i i haven't watched it yet i'm i haven't stayed away from again i i haven't watched it yet i'm i haven't stayed away from it but i haven't watched it i've been in times square and there are huge billboards for uh couple karaoke um in in times square right now it's a piece of information for you based upon my location i'm more like i'm more likely to watch this show than

planet of the apps though i will say that yeah you don't need to do that. Okay. Alright. Today's show is brought to you by Encapsular. They have website security tools and a content delivery network that will make yours and any website safer, faster, and more reliable. This is why over 100,000 organizations trust

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And your site will be lightning fast at the same time. Now, look, as a listener of this show, Encapsular is going to help you out. You can get one whole month of service for free. Just go to encapsular.com slash upgrade. inc aps ula.com slash upgrade you'll find out more here about what encapsulates up to and claim your free month thank you so much to encapsular for their support of this show and relay fm so mr jason snell yes can you explain to to our listeners uh what the second half of the show is going to be today? So the thing that you have prepared for our audience. So last week, there was in Santa Clara, California, there was an event, a one, well, it's a two-day event.

One day was like an automation boot camp, and then the next was the main event. It's called Masters of Automation, Command D, put on by Sal Se sagoyan who used to be the product manager for apple script at apple and is now an independent man about automation and they put together this presentation with a bunch of great speakers and a whole day a lot of it was sal going into the incredible detail on what you can do with AppleScript and Automator and JavaScript on macOS. And then also all this stuff he's doing that's amazing, that's being shipped out in new versions of the Omni apps for iOS and macOS, which is all JavaScript based, where they're both completely scriptable via JavaScript, and it's cross platform. So or, completely scriptable via JavaScript, and it's cross-platform.

So, or I guess they said dual-platform, macOS and iOS. But the idea there is that, like, you can write a script to build objects in OmniGraffle on the Mac and also run them on iOS, which is not something you can do, right? Because there's no system-wide scripting in iOS. So, David Sparks did a workflow presentation shelly brisbane talked about automating her ebook production and also a little bit about accessibility um there there were uh allison sheridan who's been on a bunch of episodes of clockwise was there to talk about sort of codeless automation ways to do use tools like hazel and actually the hazel developer was there too i got to talk to him it was a real mac power users moment when david sparks was at a table with the hazel developer and also the guy who was one of

the lead uh workflow developers who's now at apple um oh my there's like all the automation all the mac power users and all the automation is happening right here so it was it was that kind of a kind of a thing and the capper of the night was that I brought five of the speakers on stage. And we did, we had a conversation on stage about sort of what's important about automation and where automation on Apple's platforms is going in the future. And a little bit about what they talked about during the day. So the last part of this show is going to be that i recorded it and hosted it and so the last part of today's show will be a conversation with um those people about um about automation and utilities and the mac and ios and and why it's important and how people

can use it and where all of that is going so i guess first off i'll just extend uh my thanks to the command d conference for allowing us to use the audio right yeah you know it was a it was a thing that was put on at the show so it was their idea there was like you you we want you to do a podcast at the end of the show and i said well we're doing a lot of travel and weird things because of course it is the upgrade summer of fun summer fun see there it is it's already it's already here and uh and so i could actually do that and make that the the next episode of upgrade and and but they it was their idea from the start of like come and do a podcast talking to people um at the at the conference so so yes it was a

great by uh sal and naomi uh who this was their first conference that they put together they They had some help from Paul Kent, who used to do Macworld Expo. And it was a fun day, too. It was good. The room was full of people who were really enthusiastic about automation topics. And it ranged from, like I said, people who write tools that do this all the way down to people who came because they wanted to learn how to do it and improve their efficiency on their Mac or their other ios device so just a kind of a method talk about the conference itself like how how was it made up like what were the attendees like what kind of skill levels were they do you

think it really was all over the place there were there were some uh there were a couple doctors there that i know people were saying that they talked to who are very much like i want to do more of this to automate my life, my practice, my personal stuff. It really ran the gamut from there all the way up to, like I said, the developer of Hazel was there. And there was some great stuff. One of the last events before the podcast recording was kind of a bake-off where it was basically just people showing cool automation things they did. And I went up and showed that i've got a bunch of workflow stuff that lets me do photo uploads from ios i mean it's nothing at the federico level but it was you know i have a live

blog workflow that that uh resizes an image puts a watermark on it um uploads it and puts the html to refer to it on my clipboard so that I can paste it into the story I'm writing. Just, you know, it's pretty cool stuff and stuff that I could do on my Mac, but I can do on iOS. Now, there was a guy there who was able to take pictures on his camera, and they were on the web, like his SLR. I was like, how did that happen? And, and it was like a really amazing magic trick because in the end he, he has a camera and there are like three of them out there. I think now that one of the things that we'll do, it's, it's wifi, it's a wifi enabled camera and it has support for SFTP. So basically when you take a picture, it just FTPs the file up to a server at

his house that has a, that has Hazel watching it. And then Hazel resizes it and posts it on Dropbox and puts it in iCloud photo library and puts it in Google Photos and tags it and sends him a text with the photo on his phone saying that it's uploaded. And then he can take the photo off his phone from messages and share it if he wants. It was just amazing and like so some of it was stuff like that it's just like see the stuff that you can do on your phone on your mac whatever a lot of i got a lot of good ideas and i feel like people at different levels

that's the funny thing is even if you're somebody who does a lot of this then like brett terpster was there and some of the stuff that he does he's just like oh yeah did you know you could do this thing and i'm like no i did not know that and does, he's just like, oh yeah, did you know you could do this thing? And I'm like, no, I did not know that. I'd like write that down. Just there's, there's so much here, but it sort of gets spread by word of mouth a lot of times. So this was kind of a fun way to spread that kind of information about, did you know you could do this thing? Or have you ever thought, uh, one of the points, and then we make this in the, in the conversation that people are going to hear at the end of this episode um is this is all about solving problems like i i wanted the spirit of like the automation world is not did you know there's some like like one of the people um who did a presentation he

actually ran a script that draws a clock in illustrator and also in indesign and i'm not saying just like a picture of a clock like literally the hands move second by second and it's all just drawn through a script like the script draws the clock and it moves the hands it's crazy but uh so that is like for kicks but also to show the power of it but But most successful stuff, it's about I have a problem to solve. It's not like, oh, yay, automator, what could I do with it? If that's how you approach it, it's not going to be you're going to just close automator and be like, forget this. Why am I even here? But then you're working and you're doing something really repetitive. And then you have that moment where you think, I should not, the computer should do this for me.

Why am I doing all of this extra repetitive work? And that's the moment where automation becomes powerful. Because then you're like, I can, let me take a little bit of time to tell the computer how to do this so that I never have to do it again. And that's when this stuff shines. It's actually solving a problem, not that you're just kind of doing it because you can yeah i like the idea of this kind of show off moment because i know like when i've built like a workflow that i'm really proud of i want to show it to people i know right like look what i did i'm so clever right like you know you just have that moment where it's like finally i've i have tackled something that i've wanted to fix for a while, right?

And one of my favorite things is if I build something and send it to Federico, he's like, oh, that's cool. I feel like I did it. I did it. I impressed him. But it's a good feeling when you do this stuff. And so I think that there is, for automation to work, at least for me, that there's got to be a healthy mix of, one, this is fun to do,

and there is an enjoyment to be a healthy mix of one this is fun to do and there is an enjoyment to be had in the problem solving but two there should be an outcome which is useful yeah otherwise you've just sunk a bunch of time in and it can totally be a hobby and a thing you want to play with if that's your your bag but like for me it has been really important when i not only get to play with something and try and fix a problem but the problem that i'm fixing actually becomes useful yeah and that's and that's i think for people who are have trepidation about it that's the thing that that i i keep coming back to about this stuff especially things like workflow and automator where you don't need to write code which was

which was allison's point as well um is it it's about solving problems it's not about proving your metal as a super nerd and that regular people can do this too and should right because in the end yeah you you may not be a programmer mike but by building a workflow you are you're allowing your job to be easier um and that's it gives you the power because um i i think i say this so this will be repetitive when you hear me say it in the in it in the interview at the end of the show. But one of the things about this is it's grassroots. It's from the ground up. There is you're solving your problem because you know nobody else will.

Like this is there's an app here. There's an app there. There's a service you use. They don't connect. And so who's going to connect them in a way that makes sense for you, you're the only person who's going to do that. And so like David Sparks, his examples are all like, somebody comes to him as a client says, I want to set up a corporation, he has a workflow. And what does the workflow do is it creates a whole bunch of events in OmniFocus of like every

step of the process, and it generates an email that he sends to his client. And basically he runs that, fills in a couple of things, and then all the things that need to happen, happen. And that's for David to solve David's problem. And it's connecting email and OmniFocus and all these other apps that are great, but nobody's going to build that. Nobody's going to make a David Sparks app, right? But David can make it himself using a few steps in workflow. And that's when it really works is when you're taking your own initiative to solve your own problem.

And when tools like workflow exist and all the apps we use on iOS or Automator and Apple Script and other stuff on the Mac that let you do that, let you save yourself and solve your own problems. So you don't end up laboriously copying and pasting, or saving out a file and then renaming it and copying it to a few places, and then remembering to go to your calendar and all those things. Instead, you press a couple of buttons and it's done. That's great. That's the end goal.

Not to brag about it, but to fix your problem. All right. So coming up after this break will be that discussion, the roundtable discussion that Jason held at the Command D conference. But before we get there, let me take a moment to thank our friends over at Pingdom for supporting this week's show. You can start monitoring your websites and servers today at pingdom.com slash RelayFM. You will get a 14- and servers today at pingdom.com slash RelayFM. You will get a 14-day free trial when you do, and if you enter the offer code UPGRADE at checkout, you will get a fantastic 30% off your first invoice.

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to get that massive 30% off your first invoice. Check it out today and you'll be the first to know when your site is down. Our thanks to Pingdom for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let me introduce here at the Command D Masters of Automation Conference, my wonderful guests, the speakers at this conference. The man who put this all together, we do this conference in his name. His name's not in the name of the conference though. Sal Segoian, Mr. AppleScript and now Mr. Automation About Town. Hi, Sal. Thank you for being here. Thanks for everybody for attending and making this

such a great conference today. Each one of you contributed mightily, and we really appreciate that. Also here on this panel with me, my free agents podcast co-host, but also, of course, MacPower users and MacSparky. It's David Sparks. Hey, everybody. Sal's name is not in the conference, but the hat is. Yes. That's right.

Sal's hat is his trademark, I guess. Now, you need to get that trademark, though. Yeah. Work on that. Next to me, somebody I've been working with for, I don't even want to count how many years now, many, many years, when there was a Mac User Magazine,

she was at that place, and so was I. It's Shelly Brisbane. Hello. Hello, and what I like about this crowd is that many of them remember Mac User Magazine. Not always something that happens in the rest of my life no this is true this is true john c welch who has is a master of automation himself is here hi john hi he wrote he he he writes and has written and i mean for

everything with mac and the title i think ever, ever? Is that accurate, pretty much? MacWeek? Yeah, well, only the online version. I never made it into print. But still. And Allison Sheridan, who I've been on many podcasts with, including Clockwise, but she's here in person this time, so I got to meet her in person. Hello! So exciting! Real life.

You do exist. I do exist. Apparently. Shout out to Micah Sargent, our our pal who is not here but i'm sure he's listening so the conversation about automation this is masters of automation sal i wanted to start with you why should regular users care about automation because i hear from a lot of people who say well isn't that nerd stuff why does it you know i don't want to it sounds complicated it doesn't matter to me where you seem to make the point quite frequently that this is the, this is like the grassroots. This is all about the users. Because automation can make their life so much easier. Their computer

dealing with computers and interacting with devices, remote devices, mobile devices can be made so much easier using automation. And you don't have to be really technical to do that. And I think the workflow app has really proved that point. Its success and the idea that Apple would purchase that and it would still continue to draw sales and downloads considerably. I think that's a good sign that people are looking for solutions that they have more control over. That it's not just buy an app to do something. It's that they want to make it so that it works for them. They want to personalize what they do.

And automation is the way to do that. And it's really easy and approachable. It can also be very technical if you want to. But for the average person, there are great tools, as Allison showed, and as the Workflow app personifies, there's great tools for making it easier for you to use your devices. Now, another misconception I would say that I hear a lot is that when we talk about automation, we're talking about the Mac and we're talking about AppleScript. But you mentioned workflow. And I know you've also been doing a lot of work that you showed us today with the Omni group on making their apps cross platform

scriptable using JavaScript. So there is definitely a place on iOS for automation. And is that is that a bright future ahead for iOS automation? I think there's a hunger for having the ability on iOS to do the kind of things that you used to do on a Mac only. I think people want to customize their workflow. They want to be able to make the device more theirs on a personal level, and automation gives them that ability. And the interesting thing about the Omni Group's approach to automation is that they're bringing the Mac-style object model automation abilities to iOS and giving it a parity through this cross-platform or dual-platform, I'll call it, JavaScript implementation. And I think that's a really indicative of a new trend. I think that people are going to do more of automation because they

have more control over it. The power exists in their hands. And I think Omni is really leading the way as to how this can be accomplished. And that's why I think it's so important the work that they're doing is going to open the doors for a lot of different developers. Now, David, you gave a presentation that was specifically about the Workflow app and iOS and how you use it to get real work done every day. So, you know, is Workflow the thing that's enabled you to get your job done on your iPad? Yeah, I always felt like I was pretty good at automation and scripting on the Mac. I took Sal's course at Macworld so many years ago,

but I always felt like the iPad and the iPhone was just the big break. I hit it. I couldn't get anything done quickly. So when Workflow came out, it democratized automation. You don't have to be a programmer at all to use the application. They have built-in scripts that are amazing. You just download the app and start using them. Then you can start playing with them before you know it. You're making some great stuff. I know that just even from my own podcast, I get emails all the time from listeners who have never written an Apple script, but they took to a workflow on iOS and they're making amazing things happen on their iPads and iPhones. So I think that's really great that Apple has acknowledged that they purchased the company. It looks like they're going to do something

hopefully fantastic with it. And I can't wait to see what happens next. Now, one of the things that I think is great about automation is not just doing complicated things or nerdy things, but is doing something fairly simple, which is letting information from one app flow into another app. That's certainly how I got into scripting with Apple script was I had data and file maker that I wanted to get out in like Eudora. And I, those things didn't talk, but Apple script let them talk. And I feel like to this day, that's when I see people get excited about something like workflow. A lot of it is, is, oh, I didn't know that I could take stuff from over in that app. And we love apps, right? But it's like, but this app doesn't talk to that app. Or if it does, it's very limited. Like I can share one

item and workflow and the Omni group automation stuff kind of opens up apps to talk to each other and share with each other and share with each other. Yeah, one of the samples I did today was taking four questions of data concerning producing a podcast, but you could use it in any context. And then it took that data, created a project in OmniFocus to manage and organize it. It created a calendar entry. It created a Ulysses document. It could have created an email. All this stuff with just one set of data. And the observation I made once I got done building all this was, now it's faster for me to do some of this stuff on the iPad than the Mac, which I never thought

would have been the case. Now, I mentioned this perception that everything involving automation is nerdy when that's not necessarily true. I thought one of the great presentations today, Allison, you did the codeless automation, which there was code that we saw, but that you didn't have to actually write because you downloaded it somewhere. But you also, one of the things that I really liked is when we think about automation, we think about things like AppleScript and Automator and Workflow. And you showed a whole bunch of other Mac utilities that we might not think of that really do allow you to automate yourself like Hazel and others. So tell me a little bit about like, you don't consider yourself or do you consider yourself somebody who's super nerdy? Because your presentation was like, you don't have to be. Yeah, so I'm nerdy in a lot of ways,

but I hadn't actually gotten into the into the AppleScript and some of the scripting language stuff. I am trying to learn JavaScript. But what I realized was I'm not super deep in any of these topics, but I've been dabbling in them all so much just at a shallow depth that now it goes across everything I do. I did a tiny tip on my website on podfeet.com where I talked about, I created a folder on my desktop and I named it Delete Me. Okay? This is brilliant. This is worth the price of admission here by itself.

I went into Hazel and I said, if there's something in here that's eight days old, throw it away. And the purpose of it is all the stuff that you think you make a duplicate of, like you're going to put a photo on Facebook. Well, you export it at a good resolution. You edit it. You throw it out there, and then you drag it up. Well, you don't need that copy.

And you spend all this mental energy trying to figure out, oh, wait, that's a picture of my grandson. I can't throw it away. But I know it's a duplicate. I'm telling future me that that's already good to be deleted. So just little bitty things like that I've started to do. And then it turns into the madness that we saw this week where you start going, well, if I can do that, what else can I do? Oh, I can do that. What else can I do? And so I guess I really encourage people to try the little things. Get Hazel. Just start playing around. Get David

Sparks' book. I'm sorry. I'm going to plug it again. But, get the video field guide. And then all of a sudden you start saying, Oh, but I could do a little more. I could do it a little more. And I think that's where the less nerdy of us can really get the advantage and just little things that, that push over the edge until you're nuts. I was going to say to, to get, um, become obsessed with automating things. What you really need to do is have a little bit of motivation and a little bit of laziness where, you know, it's like, why do I have to do this? The same five things over and over again. Surely there's some tool out there that will prevent me from having to do this work ever again.

I think there's probably people listening who are like me where I'd go, okay, automator. Wow. That sounds really cool. What do I need to automate? And I'd look at it and go, I don't know. You can't just look at the list of things in there and go, oh, there's what I need to do. You got to, you got to find out what's irritating you. Start with a problem. Yeah, yeah. And then scratch that itch. I mean, that's, like I said, that's certainly how I did it. I imagine that's the motivator for a lot of this stuff is you've got a problem and nobody else is going to fix it for you, so you better fix it yourself. But then you go steal the script because somebody else has written it for you. Well, in the early days of the web, all of us learned how to write web pages by looking at

the source of the other web pages, right? And I feel like scripting is the same way. I follow your theory about that there's one Apple script and everybody just copies it and modifies it a little because I know that most of my Apple scripts started as pieces of other people's Apple scripts, including a lot of Sal's examples. And that's good. That's, I mean, that you can open those and look at the source code. That is the, you know, look at the script and edit it. That's part of the beauty of it is you don't have to necessarily write it all from scratch.

You can take your little pieces here and there and string it together into something good. That's actually how I learned to podcast. I downloaded Leo Laporte's podcast feed and I read it and I went, okay, he's got item and little brackets. I'm going to type that, you know, and I figured it out from there. I guess I'm a little bit nerdy. Yeah. I, um, that's the, um, incomparables RSS feeds or I studied Dan Benjamin's five by five RSS feed. And I was like, Oh, that's what that, uh, that's how that works. And it's the same.

That's the beauty of, of so much of the stuff in computers and on the internet where you can actually see how it works with that. You can't take apart the source code of that app that you're running, but there is stuff that you can take apart and see inside. And scripting is one of those places, which is really awesome about scripting. Now, John, one of the things that you talked about was the, one of the things I walked away from your conversation was the imperative of developers to understand that even if they don't entirely get like get apple script or get why scripting is important or why automation is important that the key thing is that they

support it because it makes their app um much more flexible and and lets users you know like you're you said i'm not going to use it if it's not scriptable there are other options yeah it's it's it's kind of weird because like like like y'all were just saying, I didn't learn how to script because I wanted to learn how to script. That's kind of like learning to speak a foreign language when you're never going to use it, just to say you did it. Yeah, you might memorize it well enough to get a couple of phrases, but you don't really internalize it. I took a year of college Spanish, but the reason I have any Spanish comprehension is I grew up in Miami. have any Spanish comprehension as I grew up in Miami. And so when an app does that, when I can automate it, when I can script it, regardless of what language I happen to choose to use, it lets that app become a thing that's a little bit more than just an app. It's not just,

oh, look, here's Outlook. It sends email. It does calendar events. It can keep contacts. I mean, there was prior to Outlook, Entourage had this really bizarre thing where it had this scheduler, but it wasn't just for email. It would schedule anything. So if you wanted to run an Apple script every hour on the hour, you could do that from within Entourage. And it made no sense why it was there. I never understood. Why wouldn't my email program schedule things for me? And one of the things it could do was run an apple script so you could literally have it do anything i suppose it had a calendar in it maybe that was the rationale as well it's your calendar time is a thing that happens so they they kind of gutted that when they moved to outlook and

and i actually i was very sad about i had so much stuff running but like and it was a lot of it and people get wrapped up well that's not it was a lot of it and people get wrapped up. Well, that's not practical, but a lot of really minor kind of dumb stuff. Like I'm on a lot of mailing lists. And so I used to have this one scheduled script that ran that was literally just a Reaper script to go in. And if there was any mail in that folder older than 30 days, it just deleted it. And there's been a bunch of kind of dumb stuff i've done but that's sometimes that's like like well like and not it's not dumb but like ray's thing with building a clock in illustrator that's creating all this stuff on the fly to create a second hand and all that are you going to come

up with a real practical reason for that nah but it's cool and it's going to teach you a lot about scripting and a lot about all kinds of neat stuff, just so you can build this silly clock and show it off. And so even if it's something that ultimately won't change the world or even make your life easier, but if something that makes you giggle, and you learn how to do this just by making this really kind of foolish thing, that's still pretty cool. And if developers give you the ability to do this just by making this really kind of foolish thing, that's still pretty cool. And if developers give you the ability to do that, then of course you're going to use their app more because you can. I mean, why are you going to use something that takes that away from you?

These days, also, the Mac is a fairly mature market. There aren't a lot of new apps coming out. There are some. There are a lot of existing apps that are being updated and all of that. It feels like this is the perfect, like Mac apps are the perfect place for scripting support because this is the platform where there aren't 50 new apps coming in, but the people who are here are using this stuff and they're really serious about it. Yeah. There's, there's a couple of advantages. One, it is definitely easier on the mac in the mac os to implement this stuff

um you don't you know pondering the work behind what omni's done is makes my head hurt it's not easy it's not easy to do it on the mac but doing that kind of thing is like orders of magnitude harder um and yeah it's the great thing is it is a mature market you don't have to worry about the entire thing changing tomorrow to some other thing and no one cares about it. A couple of years ago, everybody on the iPhone was writing note-taking apps and now no one cares about those. And so on the Mac, it's a mature market. There's not a lot that's going to radically change it. I mean, the big change in the new operating system is the file system, for goodness sakes. And so it gives you the flexibility to update an app without having to radically jack it around.

And it's weird. It's just a very comfortable environment that you can play with a little bit easier and take risks. And also, Mac users are kind of used to paying for stuff, which is kind of cool if you're a developer. Indeed. Shelly, one of the areas that you talk about a lot is accessibility. And you talked a little bit about accessibility and scripting and how they go together or don't go together. I also want to ask you about eBooks, because boy, that is a bottomless well of pain that you've tried to automate a little bit. But I want to throw a little light on accessibility, because I think it's worth it. and I think Apple does that themselves too. So can scripting help people who need accessibility features better, or can it help apps be more accessible?

It can help apps be more accessible. I think the thing that surprises people most is that automation per se doesn't function as an accessibility tool. Most people who use accessibility features automate the kind of stuff that everybody else automates. They want to make complex processes simple. They want to do keyboard shortcuts. They want to make clocks in Illustrator, I suppose. You know, all those fun things. And VoiceOver, which is the screen reader on Mac OS, is scriptable,

but most people I know who use VoiceOver have never scripted it. However, they've scripted a lot of apps to do things related to speech and related to VoiceOver, so they, again, going back to moving data from one place to another and sometimes transmogrifying it into speech, and that's especially true with iOS as well. And then there are little things that one might want to automate because they have a specific accessibility need, like I say, speech. So you might want, people would typically kind of want an output in text, but somebody who has an accessibility need might want it in speech.

I know podcasters who use it to do things within their shows so that they don't have to use voiceover to switch between a bunch of applications. They have keyboard shortcuts that will quickly take them to a place they want to go and have voiceover give them information that they need so they can continue running their podcast. Talk about a nerdy subset. Blind podcasters, man, I tell you. So I think, and the nice thing to point out finally is that all of the automation tools that we talk about, AppleScript, Automator, and certainly all the languages that you interact with through some sort of script editor, are accessible, as is workflow on iOS. So there's been a lot of acceptance and embracing of automation tools by folks with accessibility needs. Okay, let's talk about e-books for a minute.

Yeah! needs. Okay, let's talk about e-books for a minute. Yeah. Now, I know lots of people, surprisingly, who have fallen down the bottomless pit of e-book production. And it is, you would think like, oh, well, there's a standard e-pub. It's all going to be good. There are going to be tools and all that. Nope, not true. Serenity Caldwell's dealt with it when she was at Macworld and then a little bit at iMore. Adam and Tanya Enks dealt with it for many years at Take Control. You have a book that you do, but you produce it, and that means that you get to learn all those lessons too. So can automation help you?

Has that been one of the ways that you've been able to get your book out? Oh, absolutely. Well, the first thing that I had to learn was how much I had to learn. And when somebody says you can export to EPUB and it's easy, don't believe them. It's a lie. Sorry, pages. Love you, but not going to happen. And I guess the, it may be ironic, maybe it's not, but once you break EPUB down into its elements, which are basically a bunch of files with XML and CSS and all the things that we know from, you know, HTML and web markup languages, then it's much easier to automate. It's much easier to make it behave. And pretty important from my perspective, when I was doing it for the first time, also get

information back about where you screwed up. So you can validate your book and have it say, well, okay, you need to go to line 306 at position 27 and you forgot to call out, your subsections are numbered incorrectly or something like that. But, you know, I almost felt like a programmer for a minute there. And it gets easier over time because once you've sort of committed to that sort of coding-based lifestyle of book creation, and you have all those pieces in place, including a lot of automation that I have to say came from the real big brains of people like Adam Anks and other people out there who had done EPUB-related Apple scripts and automator workflows.

Once you've done that, the revisions become simpler. And I also say that whatever changes I made to any of those workflows in Apple Scripts I found out there were motivated by the fact that when I dug in to see how these things worked, I learned so much about, and again, like other people have said, I had something to do. I had a problem to solve as opposed to, I mean, I'd stared at Automator for hours, not hours on end, but for long periods of time going, I wonder what I could do with this. I bet I could do something really cool if I could figure out what it was. But once I had a project, I learned a lot more because I opened up all the scripts when things would break,

or I tried to figure out how they interacted with one another. And that made me more intelligent about scripting other things and made me more eager to do automation. So once you've got that bug, once the problem to be solved has been resolved, then you're like, you know, I bet there's something else I could do with this stuff. Oh, hello.

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to get 10% off your first purchase. We thank Squarespace for their continued support of this show. Squarespace your next move make your next website now let's go back to jason and the team for the rest of our automation discussion yeah you know one thing that i think people don't know about automator is automator is like a secret weapon that has these hooks i don't know how you did it so i don I don't know what went on behind the scenes at Apple, but the places that Automator has hooks are one of the most amazing things about it. I use Automator every day,

and I use it in a very weird way, which is as a Finder plug-in, basically. And what does it do? Mostly it runs shell scripts, which I could run from the terminal, and I have friends who've written these scripts and given them to me. Cause again, I don't want to write those myself and they run them from the terminal. And I, and I say to myself, I'm not going to do that. I want to be able to like right click on a file in the finder and say, do this thing. And then invisibly with no terminal windows opening, magic things happen.

And that's, I was having this conversation with Brett Terpstra earlier where I joked because the stuff he does is next level in terms of wheels within wheels within wheels. But like who among us, I said to him, hasn't had an automator action that runs a shell script that runs an Apple script inside it. But that is some of the power that's in automator action that runs a shell script that runs an apple script inside it but that is some

of the power that's in automator it's not just necessarily the the blocks that we think of the building blocks but it's all the unix stuff that's inside and the fact that you can take terminal commands and embed them in automator and you can take apple script commands and embed them in the terminal and mac os allows you to do that because it's not one system. It's a whole bunch of contained systems. Like you said, that's part of its power. Yeah. Automator is language agnostic. It really doesn't care what language you're using. It's really a window into the frameworks and all of the abilities of the OS. And so if you choose to write your action using Objective-C or Shell or AppleScript or Perl or Python or Ruby,

they're all supported. And Automator really doesn't care about it. Its job is to transfer data between different actions and to pass on information that's brought to it. And it's integrated into the system services architecture, which gave us exposure points like as a finder plug-in, as contextual text plug-in. And because we implemented it that way,

you have basically all of the frameworks exposed on a text selection. And it's for a user to do whatever you like. It's very much, you know, I watch a lot of HGTV. And I see people that there's this big trend of people buy these houses and they want to do it themselves. They want to take it apart and they want to put it back together the way that they want to. And if you take that philosophy of doing it yourself, and you look at the computer or the mobile device, and you're looking, okay, what can I do short of having to learn how to program code to make this mine, to do what I want with this device, then there's pretty much a couple

solutions. You go with like Workflow or Automator or Hazel at a top level. And then if you want to get into the more nitty gritty, you know, like a fancy backslash tile or something, then you're going to get into the scripting. And there's plenty of options, especially like with the JavaScript for automation. There's AppleScript. There's, you know, any of the other languages you can use in the OS. And it's all supported. You can convert text. This was an example that came up several times today. You can convert text and make it all uppercase or all lowercase or title case you can do that using coco you can do that using javascript there's like so many different ways that you can do it i'm sure that you could run a pearl script uh in you know in a do shell script command or something like that there's so

many different ways to do it which is part of the power you just it's a this is one of the great things if you are a little like a magpie which like allison was talking about collecting these little bits here and there on the Internet, one of the nice things about it is that you can stick it all on the Mac, at least. You can use those little bits, and they don't have to be in the same language or from the same people. They all just kind of chain together and let you do what you want. The purpose of Automator when we created it was to expose functionality,

not a particular language. It so happened that my abilities were greater in AppleScript, and my job in the Automator team was I was writing all of the actions. And so I wrote them in the language that I knew best, which was AppleScript. And unfortunately, a lot of people then thought that Automator was a front-end to AppleScript, but that's not the case. Automator is really language agnostic, and it's about exposing functionality. Okay, let's talk about iOS a little bit more, because the Mac has had these powers for a while now. I was thinking, by the way, Sal, you did a terrible thing, which is you put a quote by me on a slide, and it's an 18-year-old quote, which is shame on you do not remind me that i said that 18 years ago when we were really trying to keep apple script alive in the transition to os 10 it's very

very disturbing but now night so now it's it's not 1999 anymore we've got ios 10 verging on 11 and i'm excited by what sal is doing with the Omni group. It's like a first step with the JavaScript stuff in there. I have a lot of questions, but I'm curious what you think and also what other people think if you want to jump in here about the future of that sort of thing on iOS.

We have Workflow, which was bought by Apple. We've got JavaScript in the Omni group. Where does this go from here? Because it looks like these are great promising steps, but there's a lot more that needs to be done for iOS to really come into its own, I think, in terms of automation. What do you think, Sal? Where do we go from here? It's got to be ubiquitous at the end. It has to be something that's available across the entire platform in order for people to be satisfied with what they can do with the device. Again, I think that there's a growing trend of people wanting to roll their own, that want to make the device personal.

And they don't want to actually have to write code to do that. They want something in between. And I think that the work that the Omni Group's doing is a first step in that direction of providing a standardized language that's going to work across both macOS and iOS. And I can easily foresee that other developers will look at this and go, oh, that's an approach I want to take too. I get a lot by doing that. Yeah, I was thinking, watching Sal today, that for so long on iOS, we've been directionless in terms of automation.

There's a lot of us that wanted to automate. There was really, it was a wasteland, then workflow showed up, which gave one path. But it is the automator of iOS, whereas the stuff you're doing with OmniGroup is deeper in a lot of ways. And like I said, we were directionless. We really didn't know where to go. My hope is that the stuff you're doing with OmniGroup, that people are going to pick up on it,

because the way it's being done, the JavaScript underpinnings of it can be copied by any application. And as Sal has demonstrated today here, it works both on iOS and Mac. So it solves a problem for a lot of developers. I mean, I was watching you today thinking Microsoft needs to use this. I mean, Microsoft makes productivity apps that need scripting. And this is a very easy way to implement it. So, you know, hopefully this thing with Omni takes off and other developers, you know, big developers will recognize that it's a cost-effective way for them to bring automation to something.

Was it now 100 million device? How many iOS devices have they sold? I think they're approaching a billion. I've lost track. I think it's officially lots and lots. Yeah. Big number. Yeah.

So there's a lot of people out there that could use that, and it's not that difficult to implement. So I'm very encouraged by it, but we're still at the baby steps, and we've got this little thing we need to nurture it. In the community, I think we all need to give as much support to it as we can, and hopefully a year from now we can talk about all of its success. Yeah. I sort of wonder what the way people use iOS devices versus the way they use computers will have to do with how automation develops.

I mean, there are a lot of people who've gone completely iOS and there are people who use it as a subsidiary device. And it will be interesting to see how much the way people continue to evolve in the way they use iOS will affect automation and what it does. Does automation allow you to do in iOS the kinds of things that are, quote unquote, easier to do on a computer or that people are more used to doing on a computer? Or does automation on iOS create a whole new field that allows you to change the way you interact with the world based on the fact that the iOS device is so portable and so flexible in terms of its, you know, way you can use it in

different physical environments. And I don't know the answers to those questions, but that's what fascinates me is whether the development, the kinds of things that people will want to automate are going to be different on that platform than they are on the Mac. So I just checked, the official term is they've sold a buttload of iPhones. All right, good. We'll chart that later. Yeah. And so I love what Omni's done.

And from their point of view, this would be awful. But from the point of view of the users and everybody who maybe uses things that aren't OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle, one of the best things that could happen is for that to get Sherlocked. And, you know, when Sherlock got Sherlocked, the developer took it in the shorts, but the overall user community really benefited from that because now it became available outside of a single application. And so if Apple integrates that kind of thing as part of the OS, then everybody wins. And Omni might be stuck with, well, we did it first, which is still kind of cool.

But it does create a groundswell that helps because Apple's like every other company. They have to do what's best for Apple at the end of the day. And if they see a lot of people using this, then again, like I said, this is a really clear indication of them, hey, this is a direction we need to go because people clearly want this. And they're starting to buy apps based on this. And they're starting to use apps based on whether they can do this kind of thing. And so the more people that use it, the more developers that do this kind of thing. And I don't care what approach they solidify behind from my point of view, but solidify behind one because I don't want to have to solidify behind from my point of view, but solidify behind one because I don't want to have to deal with like

33 different URL schemes. You know, we already have CSS, one is enough. And so that kind of thing is what actually, you know, changes a lot of a platform. It's a huge motivator for the platform keeper, in this case Apple, to actually build that functionality in and possibly make it even richer once it's demonstrated that, yeah, no, this won't cause the end times if you do this. I'd like to go on top of what Sal said about it needing to be

ubiquitous on the operating system. If I look at my third app that I load on a new Mac is TextExpander. Dropbox is first, but then I try to get into Dropbox. I'm sorry, 1Password is first, but then I can't get into 1Password, so I got to turn on Dropbox. And then it's TextExpander after that. But I don't use it on iOS because it's not everywhere. Until it is everywhere, I don't think it really, it can't really get the traction. So maybe Apple buying workflow is the best possible thing that could have happened because that says that they're going to hopefully build it into, it'll be built into everything that we have on that. And I think that is the only way it's really going to, can take off.

But I do wonder, like Shelly was saying, there's a lot of people, well, actually, I might be putting words in your mouth, but there's a lot of people who see the iPad as just it just does these three things and that's it. You know, they say, I get my email and I get my Facebook and I'm done. So I wonder how big the community is of people who will want to automate on that platform versus on the Mac. I don't know. It feels like a little nerdier on the Mac side. Well, Apple is definitely trying with the iPad Pro, right, to say, no, no. on the Mac side. Well, Apple is definitely trying

with the iPad Pro, right, to say, no, no, seriously. Like, with the new distinction between the iPad and the iPad Pro, it feels like Apple's saying, all right, there are two iPads now. There's the one that you can get that's pretty cheap,

and then there's this one that we are going to put all of our cutting-edge tech into. And, you know, for that to be a success at the high end of the iPad, I do think that it doesn't have to have automation, but it would make it a lot easier

for people to embrace it. And there are people who are trying, and we know the ones who say they're succeeding. But there are also, I think, a bunch of people who sort of fling themselves at the iPad and bounce off because it's just not all there yet. There's also an interesting parallel on the Mac for what Omni's doing, and it's Photoshop and scripting Photoshop. Because people tried for years to explain to Adobe why being able to automate Photoshop would be completely awesome. It's a totally useful thing. And Adobe literally would say, it's a creative app. You can't automate creation. And that would be the rebuttal. And then Cal Simone and a couple other people write that plugin that let you script Photoshop. And Adobe's going, people are building businesses

around automated Photoshop. They're building businesses around someone hands them all these Photoshop files and they crank out JPEGs for websites and they're making money at this. Wow, we were really wrong. Let's make everything scriptable because obviously there's all these use cases we can't anticipate. And I kind of see the same thing with what Omni's doing and with workflow, is it's a way to show Apple, yeah, you can't imagine that, but there's like, again, a buttload of us out there. And if 10% of a billion people are using something that from a percentage wise, you don't think about as a lot, but that's a lot of people who are interested. And even if it's 1%

of a billion people who want to do this, that's a lot of people and that's a lot of money. Shelley, something you said that I really liked is we don't know what form this will, you know, where does it go from here? We don't know what form it'll take. But I think you may be right that automation on iOS, automation on an iPad, but let's not forget automation on a phone. I did a demo tonight of taking a picture and then running through a share extension, running a workflow on it. Who knows what form this will take? It will probably be more appropriate not just to a touch interface, but to mobile devices. It doesn't have to look like the Mac, but the spirit of being able to assemble things together to solve your own problems that somebody's not going to solve for you, I think, has to remain ultimately.

But it might be very different. Well, and two, there are things that are fundamentally more difficult on a mobile operating system because you don't have the space to move between windows in the way that you might if you had your laptop on your lap instead of a phone or especially a phone. you had your laptop on your lap instead of a phone, or especially a phone, you're going to want to find ways to simplify processes or automate processes so that you don't even have to interact with a particular app because something goes through two or three apps in an automated process and ends up where you want it to.

And it just makes it easier to get work done on the phone than it otherwise would. A task that would be pretty straightforward on the Mac may take a couple of extra steps on the phone. And if you can convince somebody that would be pretty straightforward on the Mac may take a couple of extra steps on the phone. And if you can convince somebody that that is a good thing to automate, or if you can create automation that is sufficiently canned that you can make it available to people who aren't going to actually be writing scripts or even workflows for themselves, you know, that's a potential way of looking at the market too.

Well, one of my favorite workflows is a stock workflow that comes with the app that you can just get it. It's free and you can put it on your home screen and it's, it's the, how long will it take for me to get home? And it's literally, I use that all the time when I'm somewhere and I want to let my wife know when I'm going to be home and you tap it and you run it and all it does is send her a text. It uses location services, which again, you wouldn't really think about on the Mac uses location services and the map API in order to dig up the driving distance between you and the address you set as your home, and then goes to messages and sends a text to the person you designate and says, I'm at this address and I'll be home in an hour and 10 minutes. And that's automation on a phone.

It's not something you'd build on the Mac, but, and it's not something you necessarily even have to build. You can just download it and it solves a problem because it's in the gallery of, of workflow. And that's a, that's the, you know, that's iOS automation. It's just not what we would think, I guess, on the Mac. Sal, I have a question for you about, you demoed a bunch of JavaScript in BBEdit, building in BBEdit and then deploying it in the OmniGroup apps. This is properly a question for the OmniGroup, but I'm going to throw it at you,

which is the first thing I thought is, first off, I want that JavaScript console in the OmniGroup app to be splittable so that I can see the canvas and type in my javascript simultaneously which it doesn't do and the second thought i had was what's my javascript development app that i can run side by side with omni grapple so that i can build my javascripts on my ipad and then like with a keystroke, convert it to a URL and open it and test it out. And I, you know, I I'm getting, it's 1.0, I'm getting ahead of myself, but I immediately started to

think I want more. I want more here. I want to do even more. Well, if you go to the Omni-automation website, there's a link there for a web console. And in that web console, you can open up scripts into that web console and convert them to links right there, copy them, and run there. So right from a web page, you can create your JavaScripts and write them, and I quite oftentimes do that. I anticipate now that the Omni group, this has been an accepted app and it's in the App Store, that maybe some of the editing apps for JavaScript would think about, that maybe some of the editing apps for JavaScript would think about, oh, well, we can add support for this pretty easily because it's core JavaScript.

It won't take us much to add in this, make this, and convert it to a URL and send it across to the Omni app. I'm going to send a message to panic about Coda tomorrow about this because I can picture it. But you mentioned something there about it being accepted. And there's this thing where, um, was it going to be accepted? And, and we talked about workflow today. David said, um, maybe there was incriminating evidence that the workflow guys have about somebody at Apple. Cause how did this thing get accepted into the app store? And it's come up a few times. I think it's worth at least kind of calling it out which is sometimes don't we all wonder if apple is the you know apple could be the enabler

of this but apple can be the killer of this stuff too and it sounds you know everybody is really worried about apple's power over stuff like this but by all accounts what we've seen is that apple's good with it like apple, Apple did approve workflow. Apple did approve the OmniGroup apps. So, you know, I guess friend or foe would be the headline. What do you think about how Apple feels? Sal, you may have to recuse yourself. I don't know.

But how does Apple feel about automation in general and automation on iOS today? What do you think? What are the signs? I think Apple's interested in expanding their markets. And one of the markets I think that Apple's particularly interested in is the enterprise market and professional services market like medical and things like that, because they see great potential to help people. They see that their devices will change the world, that can make a real difference. And in those markets, there is a need for the level of ability that automation brings. If you're

selling iPads into the enterprise, you want to make sure that that device can be constructed and device can be constructed and adapted to do the kind of workflow that they need. And I think Apple's very interested in that. And that might reflect in their apparent change in attitude. I think it's a good thing. And I think Apple's headed in an excellent direction and for noble reason as well. I would add to that capitalism. You know, the iPad has not been the seller that they wanted it to be. And they've got advertisements where they're saying the iPad can replace your laptop. So internally, they must be thinking

we need to make this more powerful. The response to iOS 11 in our geek community has been great. I think when normal users see the split screen, I think they're going to love it too. And this seems like a natural extension of that. I mean, the idea of making, to take on John's point,

to take workflow and put that into the system where there's APIs, where every app developer on iOS can now have workflow access. And those kinds of things, I think are only going to make the platform a lot more valuable to people and hopefully sell more iPads.

When Apple acquired workflow, a lot of us who are on podcasts wondered out loud, because that's what podcasters do. That's the very definition. Right, exactly. Whether they were going to kill it or whether they were going to raise it up, as it were.

And I honestly was on the side of thinking they were probably going to kill it. And I don't know whether it was just generalized Apple pessimism or what, but I think the fact, it's not only that they didn't kill it, it's the fact that they made their intentions known as quickly as they did because they just could have sat on it. The other, the middle ground, if they weren't going to kill it or give it love was that they would just sort of let it hang out for a while and maybe they would come up with a shiny new 2.0 or 3.0 workflow

a year from now and it would be too late for it to have the advantages that it does now but that doesn't seem to be the case it doesn't seem like they're doing anything on the Mac side it seems like AppleScript and Automator will be what they are but on iOS at least, it can only be

positive, and I hope that however it manifests itself that some of the... I think what Sal says about the enterprise makes absolute sense in terms of ways to use... ways to get workflow... get iOS into places and doing things in a

very consistent way, which is what the enterprise is all about, right? Making something that you can deploy in a large scale, consistent way, uh, happen. And it seems like automation is kind of perfect for that. Yeah. As someone who's spent his entire career in various forms of enterprise IT, um, the being able to, and it doesn't have to be huge things, right? You don't have to, you know, what's the line from the early days of Apple script, they're not trying to patch the world. But to be able to customize things to work in your environment, and things like that. And I think anyone who's not tried to write PowerShell on Windows doesn't get how phenomenally non painful

automation on the Mac or even iOS now is compared to the multiple levels of authentication and the outright fear you have of automation on Windows. There's a huge fear component because it has been used for evil so many times in so many ways. And that's never happened on the Mac. It's never happened on iOS. So enterprise IT based on that fact alone is far more open to that kind of thing because they don't have to have the three layers of anti-malware ensuring that the script doesn't do the wrong thing or that a script doesn't do the wrong thing. And between that and being able to automate things as needed by a given company,

that's a huge win for Apple in that market. I stopped making predictions about Apple back when I said that I didn't think there was any need for a color screen or one bigger than the 512K iMac. You might have been right about that. Wait, let me look at my watch. Well, we're just about out of time. I had one last thing, which was just to say, Sal Segoian, thank you for all you do for apple's platforms for the users for the cause of automation and for putting together this event today thank you and that's how it ended mike that's it that's the uh that's the wrap from the masters of automation

i feel like a master of automation now yeah well that's i think you're more that than a programmer if i if i'm being honest most definitely master i am an automator i'm not a programmer i've never said that people put that hate on me jason yeah i don't want it i'm an automator and i'm proud of it good good good good that's that that makes me happy so next week very special episode summer of fun the yes that's right the upgrade summer of fun continues with uh with a very special episode yeah i'm kind of thinking it of like a double feature we've got coming next week it is that that is that is the perfect way to describe it it's sort of two in one we're giving you some value next week two podcasts in one where we're going to have without i don't want to give too much away but we're going to have a draft

yep with some very special guests very special the most special and then we have the first unprecedented in fact yep follow-up mike at the movies where we revisit a mike at the movies with a fan of a movie who thinks we did it wrong and we had to watch a different version of that movie i feel like we should say what it is so people can prepare right so if you want to follow along at home we love you who who listened to that entire uh automation conversation and are still listening to this podcast and we'll tell you john syracuse is going to talk to us about blade runner the final cut next week so if you want to follow along you can listen you can go watch that and you'll be able to listen uh i'm sure if you've seen the movie you'll be able to get the same

out of it but if you want the full experience maybe consider watching the final cut version of blade runner if if that if you so desire and before that we'll draft things so you know it's all good we will if you want to find our show notes for this week head on over to relay.fm upgrade 154 i want to thank again our sponsors the great folk over at squarespace pingdom and encapsula and also i just explained one more thanks to the command d conference for allowing us to well allowing jason to to have that panel and then for allowing us to to give it all to you and I hope that you enjoyed it Jason thanks for putting all that together if you want to find his work online go to sixcolors.com

and you will find all of the J. Snell that you're looking for and that's his twitter handle by the way Mr. J. Snell not mister there's no mister in it it's just J. S. N. E. O. O. it's not Snellzone either don't go there it should be though but there is one Snellzone forever and I am at there. It should be though, but there is one. Snell Zone. Snell Zone forever.

And I am at I am YKE. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye Jason Snell. Summer of fun!