Oct 2 – Tuesday

What I did was to create an AppleScript script and create an application out of it, then tools to create icons, then MacOS Disk Utility to create disk image (.dmg) file to redistribute the program. I was working alone on the program.

After doing a research I found the driver for VIA’s printers (Xerox WorkCentre). I found where it is installed and got the address to it (it is installed in the same folder for every MacOS machine), so there won’t be any problem verifying the place after installation.

The script consist of one file .scrpt and the source code is pretty straight forward.

The script has several handlers (methods or functions in other languages) that check things during the flow of the program. One of them checks if the printer driver is existent on the machine, which will notify the user if the printer drivers are installed or not. Another will notify if the information provided by the user is incorrect. If the user inserts letters for username or empty space anywhere, an error message is shown. The normal format for username is “123456”, without the quotation marks.

The main point of the script is to avoid manually adding the printers over the network, which is not really easy and needs around 3 pages of explanations. That will be really frustrating for Mac Users, since most of them know how to use the browser only. 🙂

What the script does is to concatenate small strings (user information, driver install path) into a big string that will be later executed as Unix Shell Script.

After the shell script is executed, the user is congratulated for installing the printers and can print right away from any program that allows printing. Two printers are installed VIABlackWhite and VIAColor.

On an Apple machine the printers are shared between the users. Once the printers are installed with one students credentials, they will be the same for the whole machine.

During testing it was very important to make sure that no exceptions will occur if the application is run on a different mac and will notify if false information is filled.

The real challenge with testing was when I was learning the syntax and different techniques about the scripting language and using its techniques for my own script. The online research was crucial for that.

Deployment:

The final idea of the application is to make it easy to reach and very understandable to use. That is why I used another MacOS technique for creating .dmg files (Apple Disk Image). This is a widely used way to distribute programs for MacOS.

Using Gimp with a few tutorials I implemented the drivers and the application i wrote in one .dmg file which after mounted on the system, gives you the opportunity to install the drivers and configure the printers.

Preview:

• AppleScript Editor
• Disk Utility
• Pic2Icon
• Icon Composer
• Gimp
• More information about the tools i used: here.