September 2004
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
9h 26m
English
Content preview from Modding Mac OS X
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Chapter 9. Basic Application Scripting
Bill of Materials
Mac OS X Software
Script Editor (/Applications/AppleScript)
System Preferences (/Applications)
Terminal (/Applications/Utilities)
Calculator (/Applications)
TextEdit (/Applications)
Address Book (/Applications)
iDVD 4 (/Applications; part of iLife ‘o4)
Apple’s UI Element Inspector (http://www.apple.com/applescript/uiscripting)
iChat (/Applications)
Safari (/Applications)
Third-Party Software
PreFab’s UI Browser (http://www.prefab.com/uibrowser)
Application scripting provides, at once, both the most empowering and the most frustrating of challenges available to any application modder. Applying AppleScript to an application isn’t entirely like other programming work. It’s not enough to conceptualize the task you want to do and then lay out the actions that perform that task. There aren’t sets of basic objects and operations that work consistently time after time. And to make matters worse, a command that works with one application may not work with another.
Instead, you must wiggle into the application developer’s mindset and discover how application-scripting hooks were added to the program. You need to use those hooks to open up an application’s world of possibility. That means you’ll have to spend a good deal of time applying a trial-and-error approach to deconstructing the application’s scripting interface. The rewards, however, are ...
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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.