So I want to make a front end that feels somewhat native to OSX. It should be simple and accessible. Seeing how stable and flexible the command line tool scanimage was working, I wanted to base it on that. So really all that I need to a nice dock or top bare menu item that calls scanimage in various ways. Not something I think firing up xCode for.

I remembered there was a software package that allowed to attach various scripting languages to a cocoa GUI environment called Platypus. It is not a full development environment, but it is really convenient if you want to start and control bash, python, perl or just about any scripting language with a nice interface. It outputs a small and elegant OSX app package that should work on any mac OSX 9 or higher.

What I did was really really simple. Basically I made 2 platypus apps. One is a bar menu object that presents the user with a couple of scan options. The second is an app that takes the necessary arguments runs the bash commands to scan an image and open the result in preview.

You can download the DMG file from the file section. It should work with any Mac with OS9 or higher and it should be able to work with any sane configuration as long as a scanner is detected.

Now it is still a bit hacky and rough around the edges, but altering the script behaviour is really easy, even without the Platypus profile data. The various scripts are editable in the resource package and that is the bulk of the behaviour.

Newer versions and the platypus profile will be available later.