Sal Soghoian — who spent almost 20 years at Apple leading the company’s AppleScript, Automator, and automation efforts — announced in November that he was leaving Apple after his role at the company was eliminated. Thankfully, he has resurfaced as the author of a new guest blog series covering automation.
In his first entry at MacStories, Soghoian makes the argument that app extensions are not a replacement for user automation:
Here’s a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Apple decided to combine their engineering resources to form app teams that delivered both iOS and macOS versions of applications.
[…]
Certainly Automation would be something examined in that regard, and the idea might be posited that: “App Extensions are equivalent to, or could be a replacement for, User Automation in macOS.” And by User Automation, I’m referring to Apple Event scripting, Automator, Services, the UNIX command line utilities, etc.
![Apple's Ex-Automator Head Sal Soghoian Authoring New Automation Blog Series Apple's Ex-Automator Head Sal Soghoian Authoring New Automation Blog Series](http://www.mactrast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/automator-service.jpg)
But putting the technicalities aside, the whole purpose of User Automation is to serve the user of the computer, to enable a motivated customer to use and create automation tools, like scripts, workflows, and applets, without restrictions or the requirement of being a developer proficient in Xcode and Objective-C or Swift. User Automation is for the rest of us. Ah, remember that old chestnut?
Soghoian published a number of great automation-related posts at macosxautomation.com during his time at Apple, and it’s great to see that he plans to continue advocating for the future of automation on the Mac.
(Via 9to5Mac)