To scratch an itch for something I was working on recently, I whipped up a little app to handle automatic compression and minification of Javascript. It’s called AutoWhack, and I’ll be giving it away for download shortly.

It’s a bit of a chore to concatenate and squash Javascript manually – it’s of course possible with some of batch-file magic and the YUI Compressor, but whilst tweaking my 3rd .bat file it did occur to me that computing has moved on since Windows 95, and us client-side developers have enough hassle to deal with anyway.

So, it’s a fairly simple GUI around the YUI Compressor, which will watch any root directory you specify and check at regular intervals to see whether anything’s changed.  If it has, it’ll find all the *.js files in the directory, whack them all together and then minify them into a filename of your choice.  Load it up, choose your directory, click “Start” and you’re away.  Closing the app doesn’t stop it working, but pops it into your system tray so you don’t have to have it hanging about in your taskbar.

It’ll be available for Windows & Linux as they’re fairly easy to put together – sorting out a package for OSX is quite awkward so that’s on the backburner for now.

It’ll be up for download in Shinypixel Labs presently, after I’ve tidied up a couple of bits and bobs.