Learning AppleScript for Beginners » Mac OS X

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 [...]

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.

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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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Dialogs for Lists

admin — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:43:26 +0000

In this post, we will deal with situations when you want to choose from multiple options within a list. You can have lists that are preset, such as choosing from a list of months of the year, for instance, or perhaps a list such as that which might be generated from a database program when [...]