AstronomyPictureOfTheDay 3.0

AstronomyPictureOfTheDay is an Automator workflow for changing your macOS desktop background based on the Astronomy Picture of the Day feed.

Project details

What’s new?

I finally fixed one of the lingering “issues” I’ve had since migrating from Tiger to Leopard last month. Something in the Automator actions or other behavior changed in my AstronomyPictureOfTheDay app and every morning I have been greeted with 2 Safari windows. One is the usual window showing the description of the image downloaded that night, and the other is the local copy of the image. I don’t need to see the latter, and it seemed a little sloppy so I wanted to fix it.

After some fiddling around with “View Results” actions I determined that the local filename was being added to the output chain by “Set the Desktop Picture”. So where before I had a chain of actions that only sent the remote URL to the final “Show Web page” action, now I needed to filter the data. Throwing a variable into the mix did not solve the problem. I’m not sure how the variable is supposed to work – it seems like it should replace the output instead of extending it. So I took the brute force option and inserted a shell script to filter the URLs before opening them.

So if you’ve been running an earlier version of AstronomyPictureOfTheDay under Leopard, grab the new one and give it a try. As usual, email me with any problems.