AppleScript_ The Definitive Guide - Matt Neuburg [9]
What you're looking for, in other words, are applications whose scriptability exposes their true power so that AppleScript can automate them usefully. The scriptable applications I use with some regularity include many of those supplied by Apple as part of Mac OS X, such as Address Book, iCal, iTunes, Mail, Safari, Apple System Profiler, and the Finder. Then there are important third-party programs like Microsoft Word, Excel, and Entourage, FileMaker Pro, Interarchy, BBEdit, StuffIt Expander, and GraphicConverter. You might also have QuarkXPress, or any of the heavily scriptable Adobe applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, or Acrobat. A delightful recent trend is that Apple has made it increasingly easier to add scriptability to Cocoa applications, so new applications are tending to be scriptable. Examples are OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle, Hog Bay Notebook, Intaglio, and many others.
(As you read this book—for example, in Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and especially Chapter 20—you'll learn much more about an application's dictionary, how to navigate it, what it does, and what it tells you. See Chapter 23 for more about the scriptable applications included with a default Tiger installation.)
Calculation and Repetition
Computers are good at calculation and repetition . Humans, on the other hand, are liable to calculate inaccurately, and all the more so in the face of repetitive activity, which can make them careless, bored, and angry. Calculation and repetition on a computer should be performed by the computer—not by a human.
Here's an example straight off the Internet, where someone writes: "I want to rename a whole lot of image files based on the names of the folders they're in." One's eyes glaze over at the prospect of doing this by hand. Yet with AppleScript, it's a snap. The task would make a good droplet—a little application, written with AppleScript, with a Finder icon onto which you can drop files and folders you want processed. (More details appear in "Applet and Droplet" in Chapter 3 and "Applets" in Chapter 27.) Here's the AppleScript code for such a droplet; you drop a folder or folders onto its icon in the Finder, and it renames all items in each folder using that folder's name followed by a number:
on open folderList
repeat with aFolder in folderList
if kind of (info for aFolder) is "Folder" then
renameStuffIn(aFolder)
end if
end repeat
end open
on renameStuffIn(theFolder)
set ix to 0
tell application "Finder"
set folderName to name of theFolder
set allItems to (get every item of theFolder)
repeat with thisItem in allItems
set ix to ix + 1
set newName to folderName & ix
set name of thisItem to newName
end repeat
end tell
end renameStuffIn
The parameter folderList tells us what was dropped onto the droplet. We process each dropped item, starting with a sanity check to make sure it's really a folder. If it is, we give each item in the folder a new name based on the folder's name along with a number that increases each time.
Reduction
Even when a task doesn't involve repetition and calculation, it may involve many steps. If you can get AppleScript to perform many or all of those steps, you reduce the number of steps you have to perform. This can make for a noticeable improvement in your relationship with your computer, even if you perform this task fairly infrequently. Another advantage of reduction is that you no longer have to remember a sequence of steps; your AppleScript program