I am very impressed with Automator and its ability to do drag-and-drop scripting. Sal Soghoian's presentation was great. Along with Spotlight, these are the two things that, to me, makes Tiger a must upgrade. I am still using Jaguar on my Powerbook as I did not feel that Panther was worth the trouble. I use Panther on my other systems and am happy with it, but I am also happy with Jaguar.
Tiger, though, changes the way you use your computer! Until I saw Soghoian's presentation I thought that Automator was just a fancy front-end to Applescript. That, in itself, would have been a lot. But, now I understand it is so much more.
When you think Automator, think Xcode! What is Xcode? Xcode is Apple's premiere developer tool. Automator is like Xcode for the rest of us. Automator can incorporate Applescript and be used to create Applescripts. But, it can also use any other language or framework supported in Xcode to automate actions. This includes cocoa! Automator handles the transfer from one framework to another. You create "actions" that are similar to applications, but that do not have their own runtime code. It takes the actions from applications, scripts them and repackages them.
Using this tool a user can do what he/she wants to do without having to worry about what is on the computer that allows him/her to do it. Thank you Sal Soghoian for the great presentation!
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