14 DAY TRIAL // Over the past week, the press has been reviewing the Apple TV left and right and trying to predict how well it will do. Meanwhile, the more curious and hands-on denizens of the Internet have been taking it apart and poking around to see what interesting things they can discover. One of the hidden tidbits that swept the public away is the presence of some Automator actions.
Automator is Apple's system for automating workflows and repetitive tasks by making use of published actions by programs, allowing authors to sequence actions in different programs and link their outputs and inputs together using a graphical interface. It makes creating complex scripts easy in a very friendly user interface. The presence of these scripts is not surprising, since the Apple TV uses a stripped down version of OS X. What has surprised everyone is what these actions were meant to do. Beside some PDF related actions that seem oddly out of place on such a device as the Apple TV, there are five that really stand out: New Audio Capture New Video Capture Start Capture Pause Capture Stop Capture
While it may look like someone at Apple was making use of such actions to achieve Digital Video Recorder (DVR) functionality, that is not the case. These Automator actions, as suspicious as they might seem are in fact rather mundane, being just a part of QuickTime, and can be found on just about any up-to-date OS X. Exactly why they were left behind is hard to say, they are most definitely quite useless, as are the PDF related actions. Knowing Apple, it would not be impossible to speculate that they were left behind intentionally to spark exactly the kind of talk that has been going around.