AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Customization

No application in the world can meet everyone's desires and expectations, because whatever the application's features, it is impossible for the developers of that application to anticipate everything that every user will wish to do with it. AppleScript can be a solution to this problem. Scriptability can provide, in essence, an entire alternative user interface: instead of the graphical user interface of buttons and menus, it's a programming interface. An application's scriptability says to you: "Here are all the types of thing this application operates on, and here are the operations you can perform on them; if none of this application's menu items and buttons and other graphical interface items performs just the sequence of operations you desire, feel free to use AppleScript to create a sequence that does."

Here's a real-life example . On the Internet, someone asked about assigning track numbers in iTunes. A track number is an attribute of a song, which can be set in that song's Get Info dialog; it can be made to appear in the playlist display, and you can sort on it. Thus, track numbers can be used to control the order of playback in a playlist. This user wanted to assign track numbers immediately after "ripping" a CD to iTunes , so that the order in which the tracks appeared on the original CD, and in which they appeared in the initial playlist derived from that CD, could easily be restored within iTunes later on. In essence, the user was saying: "The tracks are ...