Mac OS X .app bundler Ant Task

I was recently reading one of my fave blogs and was amused to read a post where the author described a situation I’ve found myself in a bunch of times…

You cleverly think of an idea for a small-ish software project to take on in your free time… probably a tool you need to support something you’re doing at work or at home, or just an itch you have wanted to scratch for a while.

So you do some research and some reading, get all excited, and prepare to get started building your great little project. Then, just as you were about to sink your teeth into it, you discover that some one else has beat you to the punch.

It’s a rather bittersweet moment, isn’t it?

This seems to happen a lot in the Java world especially… there’s just so much innovation going on, that by the time a new concept becomes widely known, there are already several solid implemenations or projects that have done the work. It’s a nice problem to have

Today I’ve been reading all about building custom Ant tasks in hopes of building one for automating packaging a Swing app into a native Mac OS X .app package. Guess what? It’s already been done:

Jar Bundler Ant Task