I wanted to download youtube videos.
So I got more acquainted with Apple’s user space scripting tools. Overall I’m pretty inspired by the clean UX of these tools.
Of course, I guess all of these tools only work inside Apple’s walled garden, which is sad in terms of general population getting educated in general purpose computing.
MS still has the edge in educational institutions. It’s a shame their hardware & privacy & UX is a hot mess.
Technical details follow:
Turns out there are 3 tools, Apple Script (Script editor), Automator & Shortcuts.
Thought shortcuts is probably too simple for my use. Turned out even Automator was.
I wanted to see progress of downloading. I wanted a dialog to input the url into.
I already had yt-dlp installed through homebrew. Automator could not display progress or launch a terminal window to show terminal output, but turns out Apple Script can.
The tools could use integration, i.e. being able to jump between block style scripting and source code in a unified UX. That would feel empowering, to not have to just be trying to learn Apple’s rules, but that the system would work more to my advantage as a user.
I loved how in Script editor I could just export a ready-made app that I could just click.