Languishing? Well, that might be a tad harsh, but Automator definitely falls well short of the drag-and-drop nirvana many of us had hoped for. So maybe the level of interest isn’t quite what it could be. The concept of a workflow-style app is definitely the key piece that’s been missing from AppleScript all this time. It should help it live up to its mandate–an easy to use English-like scripting language to help non-programmers get stuff done on their Macs. It’s just a lot of us are feeling like waiting for the next version is the thing to do.

Automator seems like it needs some time to grow up a bit. It’s off to a solid start. Hopefully, if it eat its vegetables and studies real hard in school it could grow up to be a strong, healthy app someday. Throwing in a slick GUI way of doing some conditional logic and recursion would be a great step in the right direction. That, and a couple hundred more Actions.

hdiutil unmount /Volumes/DISK_IMAGE_NAME -force

Presto.

I haven’t had to use this that often with any of the recent releases of OS X, but the other day I yanked a CF card from a FireWire reader a wee tad too early. Result? A CompactFlash card in my hand and a very grumpy disk image on my Desktop. Whoops.