September 2004
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
9h 26m
English
Content preview from Modding Mac OS XBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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User Interface Scripting
For whatever insane (or insanely great, if you want to be that way) reason, Apple has actually made it a lot easier and more productive to script an application’s interface than to script an application itself. User Interface Scripting (or UI Scripting, for short) is reliable and often allows you to access most of the functionality that’s supposed to be provided by traditional application scripting. For those reasons, you’re about to learn how to script interfaces before you learn how to directly script an application. For this, you’ll need the following software utilities:
- Script Editor
This is the standard scripting development application. As discussed earlier in this chapter, you’ll find it in /Applications/AppleScript.
- Apple’s UI Element Inspector
This barebones utility runs in a floating window. It describes interface elements at the current position of the cursor. You can download a copy of this free tool from http://www.apple.com/applescript/uiscripting/. Unfortunately, Apple regularly moves the link to the software around, and it rarely appears on the first page of the site. The most recent direct link (from the second page of uiscripting coverage) was http://www.apple.com/applescript/uiscripting/downloads/uiinspector.dmg.
- PreFab’s UI Browser
This essential utility (available at http://www.prefab.com/uibrowser) complements the free UI Element Inspector, generating easy-to-use AppleScript code snippets that reference interface elements. UI Browser offers ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
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.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
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.