An Introduction to KosmicTask

Screencast Transcript

This screencast contains the following commentary:

- Hello and welcome to KosmicTask by Mugginsoft.

- KosmicTask is an application that executes tasks on your mac.

- So, for example, let's say that we wish to search for a photograph with a specific title within iPhoto.

- KosmicTask already has a task for this called Get Photos with title.

- All the application's available tasks are grouped together in the task browser.

- In this case we want the iPhoto group.

- We select the Get photos task and enter our title query.

- We want to search for the word demo in this case.

- The task executes and the result informs us that we have 5 matching photographs with a total size of about four megabytes.

- This sounds alright to me so we change our action input to request the image files and rerun the task.

- This time, when the task completes, the result includes copies of the matching image files.

- These we can examine or save to disk.

- In this first example we executed our chosen task on our own machine.

- But what if the photographs we are searching for are located elsewhere?

- KosmicTask allows us to share our tasks so that they may be accessed
by other users over the network.

- So let's search for more demo photos on the mac mini.

- In this case we see that the Get photos by title task doesn't seem to be available.

- We can capture a screen image.

- Or mute the mac mini's output volume.

- But this isn't what we want.

- So how do we access our iPhoto task?

- KosmicTask uses a publishing idiom to control access to the tasks on a machine.

- And In this case the mac mini user has chosen not to publish the iphoto task which means that we will have to login to access it.

- Now lets search for our iphoto task.

- There it is. And once again we are looking for demo images.

- Oh, that doesn't look so good!

- We'll just have to try searching the powerbook instead.

- As we had previously logged in here we have immediate access to all the tasks.

- There is our iphoto task again.

- And this time we will request both the report and the photos.

- So now we have our elusive images and can save them to our local disk if required.

- While we are on the powerbook let's use the read mail task to check our email on this machine.

- The Read mail task gets the text of the newest unread mail message or messages in the inbox.

- And if the message has attachments then it will retrieve those too.

- All of the tasks included with the application can be used as templates for new tasks.

- We can create a new task by duplicating an existing task and modifying it until it meets our requirements.

- Hopefully this short screencast has provided some initial insight into KosmicTask's functionality.

- All purchasers of KosmicTask receive at least 3 machine licences so that you can start using and sharing tasks on your network right away.