about Production Automation

Commercial Coding

Apps, scripts & workflow solutions, using Xojo (RealBasic), AppleScript, custom AppleEvents and Python

Freedman International

– ‘Freedflow’

I started looking at AppleScript in 1998 in Mac OS7. It looked very useful but slow, being such a high level descriptive language that wanted to be able to do just about everything. At Freedman International I was attempting to write a series of scripts to handle automatic document text transfer from PC Windows to Macintosh, prior to the implementation of the Unicode standard. This would enable the immediate transfer of documents supplied as PDFs from 30 European ‘in-country’ translators using Windows PCs into directly readable text in QuarkXpress on our Macintosh publishing platform. There would be no need to rekey any text, just copy and paste.

I had already achieved this workflow automation solution by locating a shareware Mac text conversion program that allowed for the selection of the ‘from’ language and the ‘to’ language, as well as select the ‘from’ and ‘to’ character sets. I set about testing, modifying, and developing the language conversion tables that were available and ended up by creating conversion tables for every European language. Doing so provided Freedman with a method of publishing multilingual content in all its varieties extremely quickly from the original Multilingual PC text via the Mac (QuarkXPress) platform.

Superdrug Stores plc / APS Group

– Excel spreadsheet to press ready fully imposed hi res PDF POS Price labels with one click of a button.

In 2008 I came back to AppleScript after watching an Artworking Studio at Superdrug Stores manually and painstakingly construct artwork for Point of Sale price tickets time and time again, every week, no less. As long as the product name, sku, price and offer type were on an excel spreadsheet and readable, I could write a program to extract all the data, throw it into Textwrangler, add a checking process on the data, then pass the data to inDesign, which would construct the pages automatically, then pass the output to the Finder and Acrobat to store all the files and create PDFs of batches of all tickets. It also took the barcode numbers and automatically added the barcodes to the tickets.

This solution saved two people about three days work per week. The application took about an hour to run and produce all the output completely unattended/unsupervised ( it was about 1000 to 2000 tickets at a time). I have to say I was surprised and overjoyed when the whole program ran beautifully.
The Workflow solution took three months to write, though the first month was more explorative and a steep learning curve.

The technology and software was rolled out and modified for two other studios, one handling Co-Op Pharmacy Point Of Sale and one handling First Quench Retail Point of Sale.

In terms of personal and professional achievement, this work remains my biggest challenge and commercial success to-date.