I wrote a little web app (in Rails) to help me manage these crazy charity software auctions and all the donations that have gone into them.

While setting up the auctions (which will start this week), I realized that I need pictures. I don't want to use pictures of a CD-R (duh), which is the only "pyhsical object" in the auction, so it'll have to be pictures of the icons for all the apps that will go onto a given disc.

That's fine, except it meant downloading all the apps and digging around in their bundles to find the icon files (probably .icns files), and then extracting what I need. There are approximately 125 applications in this auction. That's easily a full day of work, if not two or three.

Instead, I wrote a letter to the donors, and had Rails send the letter to all of the donors. Every letter is fully customized and sent through my gmail account, but directly from Rails.

It took me a few hours to write the scripts and the letter, and to configrure the Rails app to send mail through Gmail. I didn't save a full day... but it's very likely that there will be more letters that need to go to the donors, and now I can add those in a matter of minutes.

Best of all is that one third of the donors have already responded with their icons. Hooray for generosity!