AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

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 in this section I'll just explain what AppleScript Studio is and how it works, and talk about how you might go about learning it more fully; I'll also provide a simple hands-on example of AppleScript Studio in action.

Cocoa and AppleScript Studio

AppleScript Studio is Cocoa . The precise sense in which I mean this will be clearer in a moment, but it's a simple truth on the face of it, and it means that to understand what AppleScript Studio is, you need to know what Cocoa is.

Cocoa is 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, in which it can display many different kinds of interface elements for interacting with the user, such as buttons and text fields and sliders and tables and so forth. It also provides very strong text and graphics capabilities. Cocoa is a remarkably well-constructed application framework, striking an excellent balance between power and flexibility; with Cocoa, it's easy to write a simple standard application quite quickly, while at the same time the framework usually provides enough leeway so that the programmer can fully customize the application's behavior if desired. The presence of ...