June 2004
Intermediate to advanced
1056 pages
39h 58m
English
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Chapter 14. AppleScript
By scripting, we mean writing programs that act as “glue”; they pass information between other existing applications to suit some purpose or act as macros, letting a user execute several commands in some program (or across several programs) with a single gesture. In this terminology, scripts are different from full-on applications because they lack a user interface; they just do their job and exit.
The highest-level scripting language on Mac OS X is AppleScript, initially developed by Apple in the early 1990s. AppleScripts enjoy a special dispensation on the Mac because of their native handling of Apple Events, which are simply messages Mac applications pass to one another. The majority of this chapter covers AppleScript, as well as AppleScript Studio, which allows you to use Xcode and Interface Builder to build AppleScript-based GUI applications for Mac OS X.
The Script Menu Extra
Apple’s Script
menu extra (see Figure 14-1) offers perhaps the most
convenient way to run scripts, both of the AppleScript and shell
script variety. It doesn’t appear in your menu bar
by default, but installing it is very easy: just double-click on the
Install Script Menu
program, found in
/Applications/AppleScript. The Script menu extra
pops into your menu bar and remains there until you either manually
remove it (by command-dragging it off of the menu bar) or run the
Remove Script Menu program.
Figure 14-1. The Script menu extra
This menu extra gets its contents from the /Library/Scripts ...
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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.
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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.