OS X niceties in Linux: a second look
Being both a Linux and OS X user, I’m often left in one operating system wishing I had access to $convenient_feature in the other system. Two big OS X features that I miss in Fedora are Automator and Growl.
Yes, I know; a unified notification system has been implemented in GNOME (I think; I know it is in Ubuntu/Mint, but since I usually use Fedora and I usually use barebones Fluxbox, I can’t really say if it’s in Fedora yet). I’ll go ahead and complain, though, that it isn’t as extensive as Growl is. All I’ve seen it do is brightness and volume. I’ve read a tutorial on how to easily implement notifications in applications though, so perhaps it’ll just take a bit of time for applications to jump on the bandwagon.
The other feature, Automator, is something that, as far as I know, certainly is far off. There is a tool called GNU Xnee which has X11 macro recording capabilities, but the capacities are nowhere close to what’s available in OS X’s Automator, because it can’t harness specific application functions or easily pipe I/O. In my opinion, this is more than another centralization issue; the most popular OS X apps are from Apple, so they all have great Automator support… but non-Apple applications like Growl, Quicksilver, Fetch, and the Microsoft Office 2008 suite also have hooks in Automator, so I imagine Apple has made it easy to interface with.
Do I really need Automator in Linux? Not really, no. I have this much better thing called the command line. But as I rewrite the Fedora Desktop Guide (more on that later) I think more and more about new users who have little experience with scripting. There are GUI programming tools to teach concepts to newcomers, but I think something that actually has practical purpose would be more useful for a beginner who wants to harness the power of Linux. Besides, in the age of the graphical desktop, I think being able to pipe I/O between applications should be nearly as easy in a graphical fashion as it is on the command line… if slightly less powerful.
Enough ranting. Just finished a Perl script to run 300ish Monte Carlo simulations for me while I’m asleep. Time for bed.
PS: This post is a “second look” because I already discussed Automator-ish functionality in the comments of a previous post.
Given I also use both OSX and Linux (but with Gnome, I’m not a minimalist), I find libnotify basically as good as growl; it’s also usable from the command line by the way, and it’s nowadays implemented in most software. And yes, it is available on Fedora :)
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
August 6, 2009 at 8:10 am
Dogtail is used with Python scripting and GNOME’s User Assistance to automate Gtk stuff.
ou_ryperd
August 6, 2009 at 11:00 am
I had never heard of Dogtail before. Not quite as new-user friendly as Automator, but looks pretty cool. I’ll have to go install it and play around before I can say one way or another, I suppose. Either way, thanks for bringing it up.
@Diego: I think this is what I found when I was looking around (libnotify). Very cool, thanks for pointing it out.
Matthew Daniels
August 6, 2009 at 1:02 pm
i was a year or two “the computer guy” in a firm with ~70 mac (osx10.4) users. and even after i showed them how easy it is to use automator, no one really understood how to use it in practice…
that made me think, what is even the user-case for automator ?
(its little more than a pipe, and way less than a programming “environment”)
but at the end of the day, people who cant think like a program/automation, cant realise their needs in any “user interface”, no matter how “easy” it may look (and we know “easy” is very, very relative).
why not just go the natural step further, and do your desktop (program) in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language
(for multimedia try pd, and for web try lily. dunno about the closed source ones)
ps. what happened to “one app, one task” and pipe ?
osku
August 6, 2009 at 1:26 pm
osku: things like Automator can, I imagine, let people write programmatic tasks or macros without learning a language to do so. Example in OS X: sending out multiple “mail-merged” emails via Mail. But I guess you’re right that people who just don’t get it will never use it, no matter how “easy” it may be.
VPL’s seem to me like the intermittent step between something like Automator and an “actual” programming language… perhaps even more useful in cases where loops are exceptionally complex and visualization can make everything clearer.
PS: I love the one app, one task model. I even write web solutions that way. Too bad more and more applications try to deliver more and more range of functionality and often break that model.
Matthew Daniels
August 6, 2009 at 1:35 pm
300ish Monte Carlo simulations for me while I’m asleep. Time for bed.
this sounds impressive but what is it?
Jackson
August 7, 2009 at 9:31 pm
I think monte carlo simulations actually have a pretty broad applicability, but I have a virtual radiology patient (a voxel phantom) that has 2 x 10^6 photons shot at him for various different x-ray machine parameters. Then I can find out how much of the x-ray is absorbed, et cetera. It’s for MUSC.
Matthew Daniels
August 8, 2009 at 5:03 am