AppleScript: The Definitive Guide

AppleScript Studio

AppleScript Studio is a free development environment from Apple allowing you to write Cocoa applications using the AppleScript language. It would require an entire book to discuss AppleScript Studio adequately, so this section just explains how AppleScript Studio works, talks about its learning curve, and provides a brief illustration of AppleScript Studio in action. To begin at the beginning, we must be clear on what Cocoa is.

Cocoa

Cocoa is the name of a massive application framework included as part of Mac OS X. This framework knows how to do all the things that an application might typically wish to do. For example, it can put up windows, and in them it can display many different kinds of interface widgets for interacting with the user. It also provides very strong text capabilities and good graphics capabilities. Cocoa is a really great application framework, and makes it quite easy to write sophisticated, powerful applications. Cocoa applications can also be relatively small, because much of the work is done by the framework, which is part of the System and not present in the application itself.

How AppleScript Studio Relates to Cocoa

Cocoa is very big, and to use it fully one should learn the Objective-C language and study the framework as a whole. Objective-C is not hard, but the framework is big, and the effort involved is more than some will wish to make. Furthermore, AppleScript users are in rather a special position; you might easily have a script ...