Turn a command-line app into a Mac App

Alan Shaw
InstructorAlan Shaw
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Published 6 years ago
Updated 4 years ago

In the previous lesson we saved a shell script as a service for Finder. This service takes in files as arguments and opens them in Vi. Now we'll save it as a real Mac App.

Instructor: [0:00] Previously, we saved a shell script as a service that we can use from finder. A link to that lesson is in this lesson's description. Now we'll save the same script as an application. We open Automator, we choose application as our document type, and we drag utilities, run shell script into the workflow pane. We ask it to take its input as arguments.

[0:37] We paste in the same script that we did in the last lesson. We save it as an app named openGlyphVI. I'm going to put it on the desktop. Close the file, and here's my app on the desktop. I choose a couple of files in finder, and drop them onto the app icon. Each one of them is opened in a VI window. Apple calls this a droplet.