While it's popular among non-IT power users, even Soghoian admits that the syntax can frustrate those who regularly work in a language like Perl or Java. "It's a programming language that's both very simple and very powerful, because it lets Mac programs send instructions or data to each other." And it does so using commands that are closer to plain English than most other scripting options.ĪppleScript's use of (relatively) natural language for its commands is a mixed blessing. While other languages offer some similar capabilities to AppleScript, "there's simply nothing like it in Windows," declares David Pogue in his book Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition. It's also extremely easy to share AppleScripts with colleagues who use Macs - a bit more elegant than, say, trying to share Perl scripts with Windows users who don't have Perl (and the required add-on modules) already installed. Another one reads a text document and inserts the article information into proper fields of our content management system, saving more cut-and-paste operations. Another script pulls data out of our Web analytics tool and formats it for our home page "popular right now" box. This saves a boatload of tedious cutting and pasting. You can connect to network servers and even create a simple database.Īfter a few months on a Mac, I wrote a script that copies data from a weekly report I get as a PDF, and formats it for insertion into a spreadsheet. You can batch process files, rename and resize multiple images, or fetch Web pages and manipulate the results. You can use it to set your system to boot up with certain apps open in a particular way, right down to the size, location and content of each window. Even Microsoft uses it, he says (for work on developing Office for Macintosh).īut AppleScript is also well suited for the desktop. Soghoian estimates that four out of five "top-tier" Apple customers use AppleScript for serious automation - his examples include The New York Times generating daily stock charts and software developers testing applications. AppleScript's appeal is that it can control both your operating system and your applications, easily passing information among them.
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