Platypus

Creating applications with applescript is really easy but every time I use it I want to think like a shell or perl scripter and end up bailing. This has been especially annoying with the screenshot and publish script I’ve been using for the past five years. The port to applescript was easy but creating an application out of the shell script didn’t work as expected. I then ported it to Automator when that came out. Ugh. I ended up going back to shell and escaping out for native OSX image handling which is superior to imagemacick.

Platypus to the rescue!

Platypus is a development tool for the Mac OS X operating system. It can be used to create native, flawlessly integrated Mac OS X applications from interpreted scripts, such as shell scripts or Perl and Python programs. This is done by wrapping the script in an application bundle directory structure along with an executable binary that runs the script.

Finally!

I tweaked the script with a few more ‘mac’ touches, now it pipes the url into pbcopy, then asks OSX to open the uploaded file in whatever the default browser is. Then I made an app out of it with Platypus.