I fooled around with Adam Curry’s iPodder script last night with half my attention while I was watching Rescue Me. I find AppleScript so intensely annoying to work with that I might stop. After 20 minutes of looking, I still couldn’t figure out how to do the paradigm of “look for file, and create if it doesn’t already exist.” This is something I could do in my sleep in Perl, so I’m thinking that maybe I should replicate it that way. Perl has modules to generate AppleScript events, so perhaps the way to go would be to use Perl goodness to download the files and do all that handling (including the ability to avoid downloading files that have already been downloaded but deleted!) and then sending the iTunes playlist AppleScript events. That might really be the best of both worlds.
iPodder Part 2
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Perl you say, eh? Ah, me too… I’ve built a similar app which is really just some hacked together Perl to handle the aggregation, and a simple AppleScript to load things into iTunes.
For my own purposes, it all works well, but it’s just not something I could package up for others, without some sort of GUI wrapper… I considered making it use a browser for the interface, and perhaps AppleScript to just deal with the minimal stuff like launching it.
Still kicking around ideas…
Hey Pete, it sounds like you have about the same strategy I was thinking of. The iPodder works well when it works, but on the things it doesn’t work on, it is difficult to debug or tell why things aren’t working. I’m thinking that if I go the Perl route, I need at a minimum to keep track of things that are downloaded so that I can delete things after listening and not have them come back. That’s a big problem with Adam’s script. Delete everything, and next time it runs all the files are downloaded and put back into iTunes. If you need a beta tester for your stuff, feel free to send it my way. I don’t mind hacking on it if it isn’t 100% and I don’t need a GUI and all that.