Learning AppleScript for Beginners » MacOS

New Drawing Document with AppleWorks 6

admin — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:13:50 +0000

The basics of creating a drawing document with AppleWorks 6 are similar to those for creating a text document.

The script below, appropriately named ‘Graphics Hodgepodge’, shows a variety of graphics objects that can be created and some of the properties that can be set with a script. There are a lot of details in [...]

Creating a Calendar in TextEdit with Shell Script

admin — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:58:41 +0000

This is sort of a fun script which gives you some idea of the power behind the UNIX side of Mac OS X. Impressive as this little bit of shell code is though, it only scratches the surface on what you can do combining the power of AppleScript with the shell.

display dialog "Choose a [...]

Enhanced – New Doc for AppleWorks 6

admin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:14:19 +0000

It has become abundantly clear to me that there is still a lot of interest in AppleScripts for AppleWorks 6 and questions on implementation of scripts that my previous posts on this topic have not addressed to the satisfaction of those who use AppleWorks 6 and, since it is an application that is still fairly [...]

Using Aliases and POSIX Paths

admin — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:18:53 +0000

Over the time that I have been writing AppleScripts, I have found that one of the most difficult, if not frustrating, tasks of writing scripts is referencing files by path so that they can be accessed by other applications.

As you’ll see below, creating a reference that is understandable by the Finder is fairly simple (not [...]

Using Info Window Data to Write Scripts

admin — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:33:43 +0000

In the initial section of this post, I leave the AppleScript code formatted as it would appear in the Script Editor pane to show that keywords, statements and other expressions that appear in blue in the Script Editor are part of the AppleScript language and syntax and knowing that is helpful when writing scripts.

Let’s start [...]

Concatenation or Parsing and Editing of Text Strings

admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:34:31 +0000

In this section we deal with various methods to extract different parts of text from lists and other text and at the end, how to put it all together to make a new text string. This is sort of lengthy, but it is pretty easy to follow,

First, to extract text from a list. Both of [...]

Using Say and Listen Commands with iTunes

admin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:42:06 +0000

In this post we look at the say and listen commands. It is a natural transition from the previous iTunes script. Before you try to run this script, go to the Speech Preferences and click on the Speech Recognition tab and click speech on. Also, if you have not used speech recognition before, click on [...]

An AppleScript for iTunes Playlists

admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:53:49 +0000

Here is a simple AppleScript for iTunes which chooses a pre-determined playlist from your iTunes library, then prompts for the volume level. After all of this is done, it plays the selected playlist at the specified volume level: tell application "iTunes" activate set visible of front window to true set view of front window to playlist "Hall & Oates" copy [...]

Choosing a Color from the Color Picker

admin — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:41:47 +0000

The final ‘choose’ command, ‘choose color’ will be covered here. The choose color dialog is somewhat obscure and you aren’t as likely to use it as the others, but it is worth mention. It is not complicated at all. The script below results in the color picker window, with the rainbow effect as in the [...]

Choose Application

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:39:51 +0000

The ‘choose application’ command is very similar in syntax to the ‘choose file’ command, in fact, so similar that I will not go into too much detail. As in my post on the enhancements to the list dialog, I will present a script and then explain the purpose of the parameters used as needed:

set theApp [...]