At WWDC last year I presented a session on BSD in Mac OS X, and I came
up with a demo at the last minute (as usual) for it in which I tried to
demonstrate why having a BSD runtime environment (the command line
toolset) in Mac OS is a cool thing, even if you never use the command
line. As is my habit, I also try to sneak in a plug for why Cocoa kicks
butt as a toolkit with which one can wrap up a scary nasty Unix thingy
and make it look and feel much like a spiffy warm-and-fuzzy Mac OS
thingy.
The demo I wrote is a small application called DropScript. You drop
any executable program (for example, a shell script, a perl script, a C
program, ...) onto the DropScript app icon (or launch DropScript and use
the open panel), and DropScript will create a new application using your
program. The new application, in turn, can be used in Finder to run
your program on files. For example, you can write this shell script:
#!/bin/sh
gzip -9 -- "$@"
Save it as GZip.sh. Drop this on DropScript, and you get a new
program (in the same location as the script) called DropGZip.sh. Drop
any file onto DropGZip, and it will compress the file using GZip for
you. You could also get similar results (sans the -9 option; and
the '--' keeps it from complaining about files that begin with '-') by
simply dropping the gzip executable itself onto DropScript. But shell
scripts a smaller and far more flexible than binaries.
For cooler examples, see Shove.sh and UnShove.sh in the Resources
directory within the app wrapper; they will create and unpack tar+gzip
archives ("ShoveIt Deluxe"); these are somewhat better versions of the
demo I did at Mac Hack, for those of you who were there.
For those of you familiar with MacPerl, one of the cool things MacPerl
could do is to make Perl droplets in Classic Mac OS. This enables
similar functionality in Mac OS X for perl and pretty much any language
environment you like.
You can get a pre-built DropScript app from:
ftp://isp.mit.edu/users/tritan/MacOSX/DropScript-0.2.dmg.gz
You can get source from the Darwin CVS repository, project
"DropScript".
It lacks docs, though it's pretty simple. It also doesn't accept
folders when you drag them onto the icon with Finder (is there an OS
type for folders I need to add?), though the open panel should allow you
to select folders.
If you are a programmer, check out the source; it's a rather
impressive feat of simplicity.
-Fred
Wilfredo Sánchez - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
