Posted on Friday 18 November 2005 - Popularity: unranked
Scripts are often a lot easier to write than real native applications written in Objective-C or similar languages. Especially a lot of web programmers often struggle when they start to write “real” applications. However, there’s a way to use scripting languages to write native apps, application wrappers. Platypus is one such wrapper. Some features:
- Supports shell scripts, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Expect, Tcl, AppleScript
- Supports arbitrary interpreter — thus support for any script type
- Executing scripts with root privileges via Apple’s Security Framework
- Drag and drop files, which are passed to the script as arguments
- Graphical feedback of script execution: progress bar or text window with script output
- Can create applications which run in the background
- Sophisticated app bundle configuration for associated file types, identifier, version etc.
- Graphical interface for bundling support files with script
- Built-in script editor, or linking with external editor of choice
- Set own application icon or select from presets
- Command line tool for automating script application bundling
At the end, a language like Objective-C together with Xcode will always be the better option for big applications, but to do your first native steps, using a wrapper like Platypus can give you a relatively easy entry-point as long as you know one of the supported scripting languages.
Fredi
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