Get Info: #automation

Transparent compression with Folder Actions in macOS

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:44:00 +0000

I just wired this up for my own build folder—where my current project is quietly piling up data—and figured it was worth writing down. The same trick works on any big codebase, a pile of assets, or a crowded /Applications folder. I generally use it on folders that don’t have frequent churn, but do have large or compressible things added to them often enough.

It relies on transparent file system compression (sometimes called AFSC), which has been built into macOS for years. It’s nothing like a zip archive: files aren’t bundled up or locked away—they keep their names, stay right where they are, and every app opens them as normal. macOS simply stores them compressed on disk and unpacks them on the fly as they’re read. The only thing that changes is the size on disk—often dramatically. Apps can even launch more quickly, which is why all Mac App Store downloads already have this sort of filesystem compression applied.

The classic tool for this is afsctool, but these days I reach for applesauce, a modern Rust rewrite. It compresses much faster by working on blocks in parallel, uses less memory, and writes safely via atomic temp-file renames so you can’t corrupt a file.

Rather than run it by hand in the Terminal or from a context menu every time, we can wire it into a Folder Action so files get compressed the moment they land in a folder.

Install applesauce

Two easy options:

# Homebrew (lives in a custom tap, not the core repo)
brew install Dr-Emann/homebrew-tap/applesauce

# or the standalone installer, if you'd rather skip brew
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/Dr-Emann/applesauce/releases/latest/download/applesauce-cli-installer.sh | sh

Then find where it landed:

which applesauce

On Apple silicon brew installs to /opt/homebrew/bin/; older Intel Macs use /usr/local/bin/. We’ll need that path in a moment.

Create the Folder Action

Folder Actions is a built-in macOS directory watcher. We’ll build one with Automator:

Open Automator, choose New Document, pick Folder Action.
At the top, set receives files and folders added to: to your target folder.
If Automator drops in a Get Selected Finder Items action, delete it—Folder Actions already pass incoming files along, so keeping it breaks the pipeline.
Search the sidebar for Run AppleScript and drag it into the workflow.
Paste this, swapping the path if yours differs:

on run {input, parameters}
	repeat with theItem in input
		try
			do shell script "/opt/homebrew/bin/applesauce compress " & quoted form of (POSIX path of theItem)
		end try
	end repeat
	return input
end run

Save (Cmd + S) as something descriptive like “Compress”, drop a few files into the folder, and macOS shrinks them behind the scenes. Pretty easy!

Just for you, here’s one I made earlier: Compress.workflow.zip (93 KB)

No sudo required

Changing a file’s compression sounds like root territory, but applesauce only writes to your own user-owned folders, so it isn’t. That means no Touch ID or password prompts breaking your flow, and nothing running with privileges it doesn’t need.

What triggers it

Worth knowing before you lean on this: a Folder Action only fires when items are added to the folder (or removed from it), never when a file already sitting inside it changes. It isn’t recursive either—only the top level of the folder is watched, not the contents of any subfolders. That’s straight from Apple’s docs.

For /Applications that comes with a catch. When an app updates itself it usually swaps in a whole new .app bundle, which is technically a new item—but Folder Actions have always been flaky at noticing changes made by anything other than Finder, and updaters move files into place programmatically. So don’t count on self-updating apps getting re-compressed for you. When you want to be sure, drag the app out and back in, or just re-run applesauce compress on it by hand.

Choosing the algorithm

By default applesauce compress uses LZFSE, Apple’s fast and well-balanced algorithm—a good pick for almost everything. Two others are available:

LZVN — tuned for 64-bit, very fast to decompress.
ZLIB — slower to compress, but often the best ratio.

Force one with -c:

do shell script "/opt/homebrew/bin/applesauce compress -c LZVN " & quoted form of (POSIX path of theItem)

And applesauce info <path> will report the ratio and algorithm any file ended up with. You beauty!

Managing setup

Saving from Automator attaches the action to the folder you chose, but you can wire the same “Compress” action to more folders—or check it’s switched on if nothing’s happening—from the Folder Actions Setup dialog. Right-click any folder in Finder and choose Services → Folder Actions Setup…

Tick Enable Folder Actions (bottom-left).
Add the folder you want watched to the left column.
Pick “Compress” from the actions on the right.

Now anything you drop into that folder gets squeezed automatically, no matter how it got there.

Results

We can confirm the savings with Finder’s Get Info (wouldn’t that be a great name for a blog?). The Size line still reports the full, uncompressed size—that’s what apps see—while the smaller figure in brackets is what the folder now actually takes up on disk. The gap between the two is the saving.

For finer detail, applesauce info <path> prints the exact ratio and algorithm file by file.

Intelligent Agent Technology: Open Sesame! (1993)

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 31 May 2025 15:33:00 +0000

After years of unsuccessful attempts to find the name of a long-forgotten app through Google, I tried pasting my query into Gemini:

“Back in my teens I saw a software demo for a Mac/Windows app that tracked what you were doing and offered to complete repetitive tasks for you. Like renaming all files in a folder it would interrupt after a few and offer to do the rest. Maybe late 80s or early 90s.”

Gemini instantly responded with the app by name and with references. (out of all the services I tried, ChatGPT was the only other one to identify the app correctly.)

Open Sesame! was “the world’s first intelligent software assistant for the Macintosh. It observes how you work, learns your repetitive patterns, and then offers to do them for you. Automatically.”

One Thousand and One Nights

I remember seeing a demo of Open Sesame! in the early/mid-1990s. Although the demo failed—the Macintosh was supposed to prompt the user to continue renaming a series of files in sequence—the concept left a lasting impression on me.

Over the years I’ve tried to find the event I saw the app at, the app itself, or any other information. I asked other classic Macintosh enthusiasts. Time after time I failed to find the answer.

So I find it delightfully circular that in 2025 I am using the “ai” benefits of machine learning to find out the name of an app built around machine learning in 1993.

Download

Open Sesame! 1.1 at Macintosh Garden

The menu bar items I use on macOS

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:08:00 +0000

This is an expanded version of a post I made to the MPU Talk forum.

Visible

Those I often need to interact with:

Bartender (menu bar item manager; old version)
Dato (alt clock and calendar with timezones; old version)
iStat Menus (network speed; old version)
xBar (custom menu items powered by my own shell scripts)
- Proxy Status
- Software Sales Stats
- GitHub Issues
- Eject Volumes
Caffeine (used to set Mac not to sleep)

Hidden

Those I infrequently need to interact with:

Bookmark manager hotkey app (my own, unreleased; supports linkding)
OTP Auth (2FA codes)
ToothFairy (Bluetooth/AirPods helper)
Fluor (specify function key behaviour per-app)

Always Hidden

Those I rarely need to interact with:

Bluesnooze (turns off Bluetooth when Mac sleeps)
NepTunes (audio scrobbler and track notifications)
SoundSource (custom audio equaliser with my hearing profile audiogram)
DeepL (instant translation of copied text when doing Cmd+C twice)
Alfred (multi-tool with clipboard history and custom workflows)
Default Browser (open links in your most recently used/active browser)
Tiles (window manager)
Hammerspoon (my own window and workspace manager functions written in Lua)

🤓

Automating the cleaning of macOS-specific files on Eject

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 20:45:00 +0000

I’ve released a native macOS app that does all this script can do and much more!
Read all about it: gingerbeardman.com/apps/driveaway/

Dot underscore ._ and .DS_Store files are macOS-specific metadata cruft generated for foreign filesystems (like FAT32 or exFAT) that are not usually needed for disks that are mainly used on other platforms. Digital cameras, music players, e-book readers, and handheld gaming devices can get confused when they encounter these odd files during file system parsing and directory listing. The problem is compounded if the devices naïvely process files by looking only at the file extension as they will then see the dot underscore version of a file as a duplicate and try to preview/play/open it.

For years I’ve used an app called CleanMyDrive to remove such files, but it was discontinued in October 2023. I continued to use it until it recently stopped working completely …so I needed to find an alternative solution. There are some apps on the Mac App Store that look like they’ll do the trick, but I don’t really want to spend the time buying and trialling multiple apps to find one that fits my usage habits. I can make one!

I already use an app called xbar for keeping track of my GitHub issues, itch.io sales, network/server status, and more. So I decided to flex my shell script muscles and put together an xbar script to do it.

The script adds a menu bar item that allows you to:

Eject (click)
Unmount (option-click)
Eject All (without cleaning, useful when you want to disconnect all drives from your computer)
All with a handy notification

That’s it! Straight to the point, no frills, functional software.

Remote monitoring a web server job queue

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 19:04:00 +0000

I use some software called Huginn to do various automated web searching and scraping. One use case is checking the status of all the institutions where The Great Wave is currently on view, or not. I also have it do automatic auction searches for various items I’m looking for, that would otherwise take up a bunch of my time. And much more.

Huginn, we have a problem

Huginn is installed on one of my web servers and does its thing on hourly, every day of the week without fail. Well, that’s not quite true. Sometimes, something happens outside of its control and the job queue gets jammed. It should be able to cope with this event, but for whatever reason it doesn’t. There’s no easy way to tell when this has happened, and the way I usually notice is by my RSS feed appearing less busy than usual. So, the most recent time this happened I promised myself I’d find a solution to monitoring the job queue remotely.

Help from the community

Another Huginn user mentioned that I could send a regular request to healthchecks.io, which would raise a notification if the requests stopped coming in (a method known as the Dead man’s switch) which is exactly what would happen when the job queue is jammed. This was a good idea! Whilst I could be notfications by email or various push notification services, I’d prefer to get my notifications the same way as my server notifications - through uptimerobot.com - so I added that to the process, with the help of Pēteris Caune the creator of healthchecks.io.

Here is my final recipe:

healthchecks.io to get a Ping URL
create a new Huginn Scenario with a Website Agent to request the above Ping URL every hour
healthchecks.io to get a Status Badge URL (JSON format)
uptimerobot.com Keyword monitor watching the contents of the Status Badge URL (check for keyword “up”, and start incident when keyword does not exist)

And that’s it! Next time the job queue jams, the Uptime Robot app will send me a push notification. I know it works because I tested it—a very important step!

Future features?

Maybe this setup will help me spot a pattern in the queue jams? Or perhaps I can take this further and have the Huginn restart when it gets jammed? As with all these sorts of things, I take it step by step and make one change at a time. Let’s see how it goes.

Where can I see Hokusai’s Great Wave today?

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been obsessed with The Great Wave (or its more literal title: Under the Wave, Off Kanagawa) since the mid-1990s. This Japanese woodblock print designed by Katsushika Hokusai is one of the world’s most iconic works of art. You’ve probably seen it crop up in a whole host of scenarios.

The interesting thing about woodblock prints is that the original piece of art was destroyed during the act of mass production. In the case of The Great Wave, there are around 100 known, publicly viewable, early impressions that were made around the time Hokusai was alive. And there are very many impressions made after his death, not to mention modern prints that are not made using woodblocks.

The trick to seeing one of the early impressions is being in the right place at the right time, because they are sensitive to light and will fade with over-exposure. Most are stored away for several of years, make a brief appearance, and then go back into long-term storage.

These early impressions vary in their details, colours and condition, so it’s worthwhile seeing more than just one. I’ve been lucky enough with timing to get to see two different impressions: the first was at The British Museum back in the early 2000s, and the second at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery in 2018. But in 2021 I missed seeing a different impression at The British Museum, one of three in their collection.

Missing a viewing made me think about all the impressions in galleries and museums around the world, and which of them might currently be viewable. So I made a list of known impressions, with thanks to Capucine Korenberg at The British Museum for a head start. I spent time digging up their respective pages across the various museum and gallery online collections, which was the most laborious part of this project. After that I set up some automation using Huginn to alert me when an impression is pulled out of storage and put “on view”. This doesn’t happen very often—every few months or so, if we’re lucky—so it’s a nice surprise when a notification pops up. I also monitor Japanese press releases and news websites. If there’s any interest I’ll write a separate blog post about the automation I put in place for this project.

Of course, there’s no fun in keeping this to myself so I put together a website containing the places where you can see The Great Wave today:

greatwavetoday.com

As well as checking the website you can also subscribe to its RSS feed, so you’ll also receive those lovely surprise notifications! Both the web page and RSS feed are automatically generated.

Thanks to Soleio for thinking of such a great domain name!

Final thoughts

Please do let me know if this project helps you see an early impression of Hokusai’s Great Wave.

If you’re a museum or gallery and would like to have your impression tracked, please click this link and follow the prompts.

Script to quickly and automatically remux videos on Synology NAS

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I recently set up an old HP ProLiant Microserver N54L as a NAS running Xpenology (Synology DSM 6) and it’s a great little device capable of a lot. It’s also fun to write scripts and configure things to add automation and extra capabilities!

Here’s a script I wrote that will look for mkv and avi files and quickly copy-remux them as mp4. I do this because my playback setup across Apple devices seems to have an easier time with that type of container.

As it’s only the container that is being changed: the video content remain the same so there is no change in quality, the remux process takes only seconds, and the file size remains effectively the same. I also set the faststart flag on the mp4 to help it start playing more quickly.

Outline

Find mkv and avi files
Remux the files with ffmpeg to mp4
If successful move the old file to Recycle Bin (so it can be recovered if needed)
Log results to a file and fire off some notifications

Usage

I have set this script to run daily using Task Scheduler > Scheduled Task > User-defined script using the full path to the script, which should be located in a Scripts sub-directory inside your video directory.

After the first successful run I decided to comment out all notifications except the failure one, as that’s all I really need to act on. But feel free to set it up as you wish. You could even change it to remux from mp4 to mkv.

Source

Bonus

I’ve only recently begun to set the faststart movflag on my mp4 files, which meant my older videos did not have it set. So here’s an additional script, faststart.sh, to set the faststart movflag on all mp4 files.

Note: if you have a lot of videos this script will take a long time to complete. You can estimate about 30 seconds per video, for a total of (all your videos divided by two) minutes.

Automating interactions using Apple Events

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As I’ve previously mentioned, UltraPaint and artWORKS share a lot of DNA so their structure is effectively identical, including the tool palette. This is a good thing as I intend to automate tool selection in both apps and I’ll take any help 30-year-old software wants to send my way!

Chapter 6 in the book “The Automatic Mac” (1992, download) details a number of ways of scripting graphics programs. They use Canvas as an example, which is great because that is a very close relative to the artWORKS and UltraPaint apps that I use. The book informed a lot of what I’m doing here, though my approach differs because of my available tools and personal preference.

Simply Clicking

My first thought was to try the naive way of selecting tools by just clicking them! If the tool palettes are positioned in the same place (this can also be automated) then macros can simply click at specific screen locations to select a tool. This approach works well for both apps. But this is a very fragile way of automating interactions—if windows are inadvertently moved the automation will break. So, there’s definitely room for improvement.

Going Deeper

According to period Apple documentation (PDF, HTML) a means of automation was introduced in System 7:

The interapplication communication (IAC) architecture provides a standard and extensible mechanism for communication among Macintosh applications. The IAC architecture makes it possible for your application to

provide automated copy and paste operations between your application and other applications

be manipulated by means of scripts

send and respond to Apple events

send and respond to high-level events other than Apple events

read and write blocks of data between applications

Sounds perfect—my idea of a good time!

Apple Events

To support AppleScript, apps were required to offer suites of supported messages and mechanisms. These are advertised through the aete resource. ResEdit shows this data as raw hex, unless you install a template to enable it to make sense of it. Resorcerer supports it out of the box. There are a bunch of other tools that can display the data in a human readable way such an Apple-created HyperCard stack, a third-party app called EightyRez, and automation tool QuicKeys to name just a few.

QuicKeys sounded ideal as it lets me query the data, using a set of dropdown menus, and use it to specify automation to try out the Apple Events way of selecting a tool. It worked first time! But it was slow, and there was a distracting loss of window focus as the macro was executed.

In search of something better turned to my favourite classic automation tool: KeyQuencer. I’d previously searched trough various archives for any available macros, so had a vague memory there was something out there I might be able to use. I dug up AESend, an Apple Events extension for KeyQuencer.

I used QuicKeys GUI to set up the initial Apple Events call, as it allows you to pick options from drop-down lists. Then I used the Capture AE control panel to decode the Apple Events call into something human readable that I could adapt for use in KeyQuencer. I’d still take that approach for any new Apple Events.

The result was much faster Apple Events sending and no distracting window focus flickering.

Two-in-One

The end result is a macro of two parts: the first section operates artWORKS using Apple Events, continuing without complaint if the app is not open, and the second section operates UltraPaint using simple mouse clicks.

I plan to adding support for Canvas 3.x at some point as this shares Apple Events support with artWORKS.

Investigation

According to the aete resource description in both artWORKS and Canvas, selection of Internal Tools using Apple Events is limited to 10 seemingly random tools. This made no sense to me, so I tried specifying higher tools and this experimentation proved that all 18 internal tools are indeed available. I guess the description had been truncated at some point?

Some time later I read “The Automatic Mac” again and it shows a more complete list of tool values! The order seems to be based on the tool palette in Canvas.

Even so, I went the extra mile to complete a list of both internal and external tools, shown below.

Internal Tools (btol)

Name	shor
ArcRect	7
Arrow	1
BezierCurve	10
Brush	14
Eraser	17
Free Hand	8
Lasso	11
Line	3
Marquee	12
Oval	6
Paint Bucket	15
Paint Object Creator	18
Pencil	16
Polygon	9
Rect	4
RoundRect	5
Spray Can	13
Text	2

External Tools (etol)

Name	long
Coil	CoiL
Concentric Circles	CCir
Cube	Cube
Cylinder	cyln
Dimensioning	DIMN
Doughnuts	doug
Fractals	Flin
Gradient Fill	ObFl
GridMaker	grid
Mover	MovE
Multigon	NGON
Namestamp	NamE
Parallel Lines	Paln
Point Rotate	PtRt
QuickTime	QkTm
Registration Marks	regP
Resistor	ResT
Sounder	sndT
Spiral	Spir
Split	Splt
Star	STAR
Timestamp	TimE

Turning an iPad Pro into the Ultimate Classic Macintosh
How to install BasiliskII on your iPad
Exploring Custom Keyboards and Automation
Optimising Macintosh app toolbars for touch
Macintosh drawing software compared
Mixing External Tools across Deneba software
My System 7 software choices
About the interoperability of System 7 and iOS