November 2003
Beginner to intermediate
480 pages
15h 3m
English
Content preview from AppleScript: The Definitive GuideBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1. Ways to Use AppleScript
If you’ve never used AppleScript before, you probably have two questions at the outset. You might like to know: “What is AppleScript?” And you also might like to know: “And why should I care, anyway?” This chapter gives general answers to both questions, by focusing on the question: “What is AppleScript for?” The chapter classifies the main kinds of use for AppleScript, and provides some examples showing AppleScript being put to these various kinds of use.
The purpose of this chapter is as much motivational as informative. By demonstrating AppleScript in action, in some typical real-life contexts, I hope to get you thinking by extension about ways in which you might now or in the future want to use AppleScript in your own life. If you can mentally formulate some appropriate tasks you actually want to perform with AppleScript, you’ll have more reason to learn it, and you’ll learn it more easily and more enjoyably.
The Nature and Purpose of AppleScript
As you know, you’ve got various applications on your computer, and you typically make them do things by choosing menu items and clicking buttons and generally wielding the mouse and keyboard in the usual way; and you get information from them by reading it off the screen, or you can communicate information from one application to another by copying and pasting.
With AppleScript, you can make applications do things, not with the mouse and keyboard and screen, but programmatically—by writing and executing ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.