Filed under: Cool tools, Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard Services in practice: Amazon S3 uploader
I stumbled upon a great example of the Snow Leopard Services that I've been drooling over. The S3 Upload Service by August Lilleaas is available as a workflow which can be opened in Automator, so you can examine its inner workings. It uses AppleScript and Ruby, easily passed back and forth thanks to Automator's building-block-style workflow. It lets you upload a publicly-accessible file to an S3 bucket, and copies the URL into your clipboard upon successful upload.
The workflow requires that you at least have RubyGems installed, and have an Amazon S3 account set up, but it will handle the rest. It asks for your S3 credentials with an AppleScript popup, which has the unfortunate side effect of not being able to be forced to the front very easily and tends to get lost behind other windows. There are workarounds to that, but no way to keep it on top once it's up. It looks possible to build custom nibs for your services, so I might play around with making a general-purpose utility panel popup to fill the void in my own projects.
In the process of rolling my own Services in Snow Leopard, I've definitely found some limitations, but I'm having fun working around them. This one is a great example of passing results -- returned from different languages -- and processing them, all within Automator. It's not super-polished -- your mileage may vary -- but a big thanks to August for putting it out there for the rest of us to play with!
Get a WordPress.com Blog
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
dagamer43 said 3:04PM on 9-06-2009
Is there a website that has some handy services ready for users to download? For the most part, I'd say services was one of the most underused parts of OS X in years past.
Reply
Brett Terpstra said 3:20PM on 9-06-2009
There is a great one I found the other day, but I can't find it in my history right now. It was something like "Welcome to OS X Automation," but as soon as I figure it out, I'll post it here for you.
Brett Terpstra said 3:22PM on 9-06-2009
Ah, found it. It's run by Apple, I believe:
http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/download/
dagamer43 said 3:46PM on 9-06-2009
Are custom services a new feature in Snow Leopard? Did they get an overhaul (besides the endless menu clutter in Leopard)?
Reply
Quinn Taylor said 4:39PM on 9-06-2009
Oh yeah. You can create new services from within Automator, including composing a service from multiple Automator workflow steps. It's quite nice. :-)
Mark said 8:17PM on 9-06-2009
Devon Technologies (makers of DevonThink) have several awesome services that I use all the time.
http://www.devon-technologies.com/download/index.html#freeware
Jason said 7:41PM on 9-06-2009
I'm a little ignorant of services and the automator tool. I've checked into them a bit, but I really haven't had the time, resources, or motivation to investigate thoroughly enough to help improve my workflow.
...can anyone recommend some sites that give a good walkthrough of these things? I need an explanation for why they're handy, some examples, and a step-by-step.
Reply
Derick said 7:39AM on 9-07-2009
how about one of these for dropbox? i'm completely ignorant on Automator
Reply