Welcome to the beta release of I-Spy. Both, the tool and the documentation are initial attempts and will likely evolve and grow; perhaps even due to your comments and suggestions :-). Please be aware that while I tested this collection of scripts, I have certainly failed to replicate your environment, and you may encounter problems.
I-Spy is an AppleScript applet which peruses FTP sites and notes changes since its last run. It then filters and reduces these changes, and finally either downloads new items via FTP or displays the list of URLs to these items with a web browser.
I-Spy is also an attempt to harness the power of diverse Macintosh applications much in the same way that scripting languages allow this under Unix. To its credit, I believe AppleScript allowed me to do this. Indeed, where AppleScript itself proved too cumbersome or too slow, I was able to delegate the processing to another program or even another scripting language. The folks at Apple and authors of the multitude of scriptable applications deserve their accolades. What's more, most of the tools tapped by I-Spy are freely available, while the rest are shareware.
My attempt to emulate Unix may have gone a bit too far as I-Spy grew up to be rather different from common MacOS applications where a user may peek and poke about and learn about the program. I-Spy definitely requires the user to donne the hacker cap and peek and poke deeper. A knowledge of AppleScript or Perl is not necessary, but likely to prove helpful. Think of it as an adventure...with many clues below. Once "solved," I-Spy may prove a valuable tool requiring minimal maintenance and interaction.