Say you need a bunch of Apple IDs, and you need them pronto. There’s a form you can fill out, a bunch of questions floating in a window in some application, it can feel very… manual. A gentleman on the Enterprise iOS site entered, filling the void with an Applescript that could batch create ID’s with iTunes (and has seen updates thanks to Aaron Friemark.)
That bikeshed, though, was just not quite the color I was looking for. I decided to Fake it. Are we not Professional Computer Operators?
Before I go into the details, a different hypothetical use case: say you just migrated mail servers, and didn’t do quite enough archiving previously. Client-side moves may be impractical or resource-intensive. So you’d rather archive server-side, but can’t manipulate the mail server directly, and the webmail GUI is a touch cumbersome: are we relegated to ‘select all -> move -> choose folder -> confirm’ while our life-force drains away?
Fake is described as a tool for web automation and testing. It’s been around for a bit, but took an ‘Aha!’ moment while pondering these use cases for me to realize its power. What makes it genius is you don’t need to scour html source to find the id of the element you want to interact with! Control-drag to the element, specify what you want to do with it. (There are top-knotch videos describing these options on the website.) And it can loop. And delay(either globally or between tasks,) and the tasks can be grouped and disabled in sections and organized in a workflow and saved for later use. (Can you tell I’m a bit giddy about it?)
So that mail archive can loop away while you do dishes. Got to the end of a date range? Pause it, change the destination folder mid-loop, and keep it going. (There is a way to look at the elements and make a conditional when it reads a date stamp, but I didn’t get that crazy with it… yet.)
And now even verifying the email addresses used with the Apple ID can be automated! Blessed be the lazy sysadmin.
