Recording your OS

Yeah, I wish it were that simple. There's a cool thread over at MacSlash about Automator for OSX. We all thought it was the "Great White Hope" of scripting the OS. That is, it was supposed to be easier than AppleScript. It was supposed to bring scripting to the masses.

Guess what? It didn't. There were some apps back in the 80's that would actually record almost anything you could do in the OS, or an application. I think it debuted a while after MultiFinder... After hitting "record" it would make one big-ass macro (before those just spread virii) of whatever you happened to do during the recording. Simple, yes? Well back then it wasn't too bad. A few thousand lines of code comprised every app you had memory to run. Nowadays thousands of lines of code might just be for a stupid printer driver.

That dang Record button is still in AppleScript, but I can't get it to work. Besides, there are too many things not supported by AppleScript. I quit using iChat because I couldn't "do something" via Automator or scripting. Every time I'd open my iBook, iChat would show me as available. Well, I wasn't always "available" when I just opened my machine. So I wanted that to stop. No prefs will allow it, and I found out it couldn't be scripted to do that either... Huh? Isn't this a computer? Since when does it tell me no?

Here's hoping Automator comes down to one simple button in the interface: RECORD.