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Automating MacTF-EPG
One of the things on my ToDo list was to hook some of the functions in
MacTF-EPG up to AppleScript. This isn't the easiest
thing when you do it
the first time, but luckily I had worked out how for MacTF, so it was
mainly a process of copying the relevant files and changing them to fit
MacTF-EPG. This went fairly smoothly and before
long the app could
download data and upload it to the Toppy via AppleScript.
Where it got a bit harder was adding the automation so it was, you know,
automatic... I've not really delved into cron and the like, and as
MacTF-EPG is 10.4+ anyway, I thought I'd go for the
launchd approach.
For those who haven't heard of launchd, it's basically Apple's
replacement for cron as well as a number of other Unix processes. It
runs off XML files and is actually one of the first processes launched
during startup, and it is responsible for starting most of the
others.
So far so good. I played around with some of the XML plist files and
slowly worked out some of the options. Lots of the links on Google about
launchd refer to a number of (fairly large) bugs that existed in 10.4.0
through to 10.4.2. One of these was that repeated launches of a program
based on a time/date was broken in that it would launch fine the first
time, but never again (until a restart I guess). As this is fairly
important (especially as I wanted something to fire daily), it was
lucky that it was fixed in 10.4.3. However, it seems it isn't completely
fixed, as now when you set a timer for daily use, it won't fire the
first go, but then will the next time around (and hopefully thereafter).
Which makes it a pain in
the arse for testing, as I need to wait 24 hours to fix any errors I
make...
The good news is that I think I have it working, so expect an update
soon.
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