If you’re anything like I am, you have scripts that call do random things, or call other apps behind the scenes to set environments to do other things, etc etc. The issue I run into is it doesn’t seem pretty to have aliases in my Applications folder. You can’t set Icons for aliases, and it just sits there as a plain white Icon. Not cool, man, not cool. As I was studying Swift code tonight I ran across a gem I thought I’d share which helps amazingly with this problem! It’s called Platypus, and it creates an app that will run scripts (bash, csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh, Perl, Python, Ruby, Applescript, Tcl, Expect, PHP, Swift, and others) that you set the name for and environment. Details below.
It’s fairly straight forward, which is nice. The app name is free form, and so is the author name. The script path you can type in yourself or find it with ‘select script…’. If you’re adventurous, the “new” button can be used to create your script right there.
For me, the great part is the interface dropdown which allows you to pick how the called script will be interfaced with. I pick ‘none’ so it runs in the background out of view. I have a few ‘wine’ scripts that I call with this, and allows it to run out of sight and out of mind. As far as icons, I’ve used jpg and ico files by selecting the gear under the picture and choosing ‘select image file…’. The ones that are able to be used are not shaded out, which is great.
When you click ‘create app’, it will ask you where you want to save it along with the name of the app. There are other development related selections underneath that can be chosen which I don’t have any experience with.
I’ve so far used this to call ‘Microsoft Money 2002’ via Wine, along with calling ‘Notepad++’ via Wine. It works nicely, for me. It’s available for free (you can donate if you enjoy it) at http://sveinbjorn.org/platypus.
The dude made an awesome app.
For those interested, he also makes another app called “Sloth” that acts as a visual version of the cli tool ‘lsof’. Kinda neat, I just started looking at it about 10 minutes ago. It’s available off of his main page, just remove “platypus” from the URL and you’ll see links. (or just go to http://sveinbjorn.org/sloth)
Kinda neat to immediately see where Google Drive is connecting to, that easily.
The Sociopathic Mind of a Certified Eclectic 