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Basic AppleScript Dialog:

display dialog "Your text here" with icon stop buttons {"OK"} default button {"OK"} giving up after 5

'giving up after 5' will automatically close the script after the indicated interval of time has elapsed.

HTML Anchor Code

Here is a sample of how to write code to link one part of your blog page to another:

<a name = "By Email">[optional text]</a> --place this where you want the link to go <a href = "#By Email">By Email</a> --this is the actual link

more HTML

HTML Code to Link to Other Web Pages

Here is a sample of code to link to another page. this is similar to the anchor code, except that the destination code is the url of the destination site:

<a href= "www.webSite.
com"> Website Name</a>

--just replace "www.webSite.
com" with the actual url destination site and replace 'Website Name' with the prompt that the user will see.
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AppleScript Note:

It might be interesting to those of you who are AppleScript enthusiasts that the HyperCard (HyperTalk) project was the prototype back in the '80's of what became the system-wide Applescript language (akin to JavaScript) that is in use today.
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Trapping for List Dialog Errors

With 'List Dialog' type dialogs, since errors cannot be intercepted in an 'on error' handler, there is no 'normal' way to trap for 'Cancel' which, of course, would result in some sort of undesirable error dialog such as 'User cancelled. Error number -128'. Here is an example of one simple way I have found to trap for this type of error: set x to (choose from list {"Joe","Amy",
"Bill"} with prompt "Choose a record:")
if x is false then
else
set targetItem to (x as text)
show every record whose cell "Name" contains x
end if
 When the user clicks on 'Cancel', the variable x is assigned the boolean value false. So all you have to do is set up a conditional to deal with that and to perform the usual statements otherwise.

Learning AppleScript

Create Multiple Folders with Terminal

If you are more of a techy kind of person and are comfortable with using Terminal, here is a script you can use to easily create multiple folders:

First, for a single folder, type in: mkdir "Folder 1" --or whatever you want to name your folder, this creates a new directory, which, in effect is a new folder. To place multiple items in the 'Documents' folder: cd/Users/ Administrator/ Documents mkdir "Folder 1" "Folder 2" "Folder 3" To quickly create multiple folders, create a text file with the desired folder names (as many as you want) and name it something like 'folderList .txt'. Next type this in Terminal: cat folderList.txt |xargs mkdir Or you could create folders with the same prefix by entering: mkdir "Invoices " {"Corporate", "Individual", "Pro-Bono"}

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Mac LC III (1994), the first Mac that I ever owned, the CD-Rom and Zip drive were added much later.

Mac LC III (1994), the first Mac that I ever owned, the CD-Rom and Zip drive were added much later.

Basic HTML

Here is an example of a very simple HTML document:

<html>
<head>
<title>Basic HTML Document</title>
</head>
<body>
Your text goes here
</body>
</html>

more HTML
«  
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AppleScript - When to Use Set and When to Use Copy

Apple Floppies 1024x608 300x178This one can be a difficult one, but if you have been following my posts so far, or otherwise are that much interested in learning AppleScript, this is an important issue to get straight.

Even if you have been using AppleScript for a while, as I have, you may still be unclear as to the difference between using set and using copy. In fact you may, as I thought for the longest time, think that they are synonyms. This is in many cases true, such as in statements like:

set clientName to "Joe Gonzalez"

copy "Joe Gonzalez" to clientName


In both cases, the variable clientName is set to the value of “Joe Gonzalez”.

If we try to use these interchangeably in the following statements, however, we get very different results. To illustrate this, have a look at these two scripts, which, on the surface would appear to have the same result:

set todaysDate to current date
set tomorrowsDate to todaysDate
set day of tomorrowsDate to (day of todaysDate) + 1
return date string of todaysDate

The last statement, it would seem, would give us the current date: say ‘Tuesday, June 9, 2009′. Unexpectedly, the value of the variable ‘todaysDate’ is now ‘Wednesday, June 10, 2009′ – not what we want. The reason for this anomaly is that when we use set to ‘set’ the value of a second variable, any changes to the value of the second are also changed in the former. This is because ‘set’ makes the second variable a clone to the original.

If we want to use the original variable as an initial value for the second without effecting the value of the original then we must use the keyword ‘copy’:

set todaysDate to current date
copy todaysDate to tomorrowsDate
set day of tomorrowsDate to (day of todaysDate) + 1
return date string of todaysDate

In the second case with ‘copy’, todaysdate retains its original value; using copy instead of set makes the new variable tomorrowsDate an independent variable.

This principle holds true for lists, records and script objects as well. In other words, the set keyword is a reference to the original item which is why, with ordinary text strings they are can be used interchangeably.

This is one of those things that you will encounter with AppleScript, where you can get the correct result every time you run a script and think that it will always work, and then you try to use it with another data type and get a big surprise.

sphinn

Questions or comments are always welcome (positive – hopefully or negative – if that is the case). Contact me at: hyperscripter@gmail.com or http://twitter.com/hyperscripter.

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June 9th, 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Category: MacOS, Set and Copy

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Create Multiple Folders with Terminal

If you are more of a techy kind of person and are comfortable with using Terminal, here is a script you can use to easily create multiple folders:

First, for a single folder, type in: mkdir "Folder 1" --or whatever you want to name your folder, this creates a new directory, which, in effect is a new folder. To place multiple items in the 'Documents' folder: cd/Users/ Administrator/ Documents mkdir "Folder 1" "Folder 2" "Folder 3" To quickly create multiple folders, create a text file with the desired folder names (as many as you want) and name it something like 'folderList.txt'. Next type this in Terminal: cat folderList.txt |xargs mkdir Or you could create folders with the same prefix by entering: mkdir "Invoices " {"Corporate", "Individual", "Pro-Bono"}

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An AppleScript to Verify a Date

Run this in the Script Editor:

set dateRecord to (current date)
set defaultDate to (date string of dateRecord)
try
set apptDate to text returned of (display dialog "Enter appointment date:" default answer defaultDate buttons {"Set"} default button {"Set"})
set datetext to apptDate as text
date apptDate --if an invalid date is entered, the next dialog is aborted and it triggers the error alert below.
display dialog datetext & " is a valid date." with icon note buttons {"OK"} default button {"OK"}
on error
set alertText to "An error has occurred!"
set messageText to quote & datetext & quote & " is an invalid date."
display alert alertText message messageText as warning buttons {"OK"} default button "OK" giving up after 15
return
end try

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