Masters of Automation 2017 Videos

Still the jackass who killed Mac Automation as we know it. A fine salesman for other's grand ideas, but couldn't organize a pissup in a brewery on his tod if his life depended on it. Will he cop to his errors, or continue to play like his own shit doesn't stink the whole house down? Not holding my breath. #prick #wanker

@has I follow the comments here because there’s usually a lot of insightful discussion. Why did you add such personal vitriol? Do you know Sal personally?

I am curious how Sal killed Mac Automation, rightly or wrongly (I always subscribed to the former), Sal is known as the guy who kept Mac Automation alive. I could be completely wrong, so an honest question for has, would you be willing to share your insights on this matter? Thank you.

1. Apologies to our gracious host for the late night drunk post. Last week was a challenge.

2. Sal Soghoian took six weeks of my time after WWDC14, freely given on the one condition he not waste my time, and tossed it down the pan without even a “thanks but no thanks”. Just cos I had the affront to tell him something he didn’t want to hear: that JavaScript for Automation—which should’ve been Apple’s answer to Node.js—was so riddled with defects it was simply not fit to ship in 10.10.

Then, a year after Sal immediately abandoned JXA to fail, I swallowed that frustration and went back to the man, begging him to take SwiftAutomation off me as a last-ditch attempt to reverse Mac Automation’s collapse. And for that trouble the patronizing arse blew me off, and then, after I told him bluntly just how badly he’d fucked things up, ignored me completely.

For a while I wondered if it was just me, but then I saw him pull the exact same act on an experienced JavaScripter who pointed out (in the nicest, most helpful way possible) that the JS code on his OmniAutomation site was schlonky amateur crap. Sal may be a genuinely talented evangelist/salesman, but he’s also a thin-skinned martinet, a rank amateur with delusions of professionalism and an enormous delicate ego that can’t handle criticism of any sort. Your BFF long as you worship the sun shines out of his ass, but question or challenge him, or—Dog forbid—*be better at it than him*, and you’re persona non grata.

Me, I’m an absolutely shit salesman, but I am THE world expert in Apple event bridge building; fucking me off was arguably his single biggest mistake because after 15 years working the problem and having learned from my own mistakes on the appscript project, I knew exactly what was required to make JavaScript and Swift into massively popular Mac Automation clients, and was prepared to work my ass off to make it happen, including book writing, community building, and user support. When I fuck about and honk off project supporters of that calibre (Hi, Matt N!) at least *I* have the good fucking manners to apologize—repeatedly—for my behavior.

NO mistakes were EVER made by Sal and his team, NOTHING is EVER Sal’s fault, and he CAN’T POSSIBLY imagine a reason why Apple “suddenly” “eliminated his position”, just as they happened to be doing their first major deadwood clearout in 20 years.

Listen to the man in interviews (e.g. https://www.twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/359); his talent for selling the *vision* of Mac Automation is matched only by his talent for evading any question of why it’s failed to prosper in practice.

No new AppleScript books this decade; no AppleScript market growth this decade; popular Python, Ruby, ObjC, JavaScript, and Swift languages all ruined as AppleScript alternatives; Mac Automation team eliminated in 2016; AppleScript documentation retired this year; Siri Shortcuts most likely coming to Mac in 2019 as the New Big Thing; and yet Sal is happily taking great whacks of cash off Mac Automation enthusiasts telling them that AppleScript is wonderful and healthy as ever, when he damn well *knows* it’s almost certainly already dead because he’s the one that killed it. It just hasn’t stopped twitching yet.

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Apple gave Sal *three* highly trained, hidevelopers ($500K+ budget) to build JXA into a multi-million user success, and he couldn’t even get it close to matching appscript’s near-miss failure. And appscript was written by a single art school dropout with NO training and NO resources, as is the best-in-world artwork automation system I’ve since built on it. With 3 developers I would *own* the ~$100M packaging artwork industry, but we can’t even hire one Mac Automator of the calibre required because they simply don’t exist any more; not since 10.5’s Scripting Bridge undid everything that appscript was slowly beginning to build up.

So much for “putting Automation in the hands of *everyone*”, Sal. All you’ve done is take it away.