We have all seen the famous film of the woman who took a picture of herself every day for 3 years. If you haven’t seen it, check it out after the break. I though this was very cool and ever since I saw the video, I have been trying to take a picture of myself everyday. This article explains how to setup a task on your Mac so you can take a picture of yourself everyday.
Before we get going into the explanation, below is the clip I am talking about.
Automation
In brief we will be using our Mac’s iSight camera to take a picture. You will schedule an event in iCal to run an AppleScript at a certain time of the day that will open Photo Booth to take your picture.
Purpose
The purpose for trying to automate this is simple. I like to take my daily photo first thing in the morning just after I get ready and before I leave for the day. Often however, I am in a hurry and usual forget to do it. Having the application open and waiting for me to select “Take Picture” will greatly increase my chance of taking the photo before I get lost in my daily RSS feeds.
Creating The AppleScript
Creating an AppleScript to open an application is quite easy. All you need to do is open the Script Editor and write the following code.
activate – Opens Photo Booth and puts it frontmost
end tell
Save your file, mine is in “/Library/Scripts/“, so we can tell iCal to use it later.
Create a Task in iCal
Creating a task in iCal is just like any event. Just select the date, time, recurring, etc. The only difference that we will do now is for the alarm, select “Run script”. You will then select the script you just saved.
* It is important to note that iCal can directly open applications without using AppleScript. I choose to write an AppleScript just to show you the possibilities with creating tasks in iCal.
Below are the settings I made for my event.
My days sometimes start early so I have it going off at 6:00 a.m.
Conclusion
Now Photo Booth should open every day so you can remember to take a photo. As you can see, the combination of iCal and AppleScript give you great flexibility to automate some of your tasks. Nonetheless, this is a great way to help you remember to take a daily photo so that in 3 years you will have a cool video to show off.
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