Angela's website -- AppleScript
Angela Brett's
integrated cheese


mathematician by the method of exhaustion, programmer by nature, physicist by and by, linguist by using outdated web development experience to wrangle into a Masters program, writer by the lake

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AppleScript

Since Mac OS 9, every so often I've written an AppleScript to automate some task or other. I thought it would be an easy language to learn, given my experience with HyperCard and AppleScript's similarity to HyperCard. But it's just different enough that I suspect my HyperCard experience is a hinderance. That combined with the fact that there's usually a long time between each time I write an AppleScript means that it usually takes me quite a while to figure out or remember how to do something. The commands specific to applications are easy enough to use, I can look them up in the dictionaries. It's just the general AppleScript stuff that gets me, the things which ought to be really easy, which are so easy that they're not really documented.

That said, once I've finally figured out an AppleScript I usually find it very useful. I wrote an AppleScript to create the site map and background picture of this page, using OmniGraffle. I have another one at work which opens up all the programs I use and logs into various servers and runs some shell commands when I log in. It might not seem like much, but early in the morning, I can stuff around for half an hour doing that mundane stuff, trying to figure out why I'm awake and what I'm supposed to be doing.

This page has been accessed times since 2024-05-01 07:38:07 Last updated: 2007-01-26 12:05:45
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