Apple Previews New Script Editor

DrC writes "Apple has released a preview update to the venerable Script Editor, rewritten using Cocoa. It looks like an impressive upgrade." The preview release is included with the Dec 2002 Developer Tools as a separate install, too.

Comments

Advantages of AppleScript over sh, awk, sed, etc?

[rmlane]

I'm a Unix -> OS X switcher, I can script in sh, awk, expect, etc. What advantages are there to learning AppleScript? Is the GUI integration anything like expectk?

Re:Advantages of AppleScript over sh, awk, sed, et

[pudge]

The author of MacPerl once wrote a Perl OSA component. It was an essentially failed experiment, though I couldn't tell you all the reasons why. What I can say is that I don't think it's necessary for most purposes. MacPerl can speak Apple events, and now perl under Mac OS X can too, with Mac::Carbon. Soon Mac::Glue will also be ported to Mac OS X, allowing you to directly access "AppleScript" vocabulary from Perl, with stuff like:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Mac::Glue;

my $iTunes = new Mac::Glue 'iTunes';
my $tracks = $iTunes->obj( tracks => playlist => 'Blues' );

$iTunes->activate;
$iTunes->play( $tracks );

That's hopefully coming to Mac OS X in January or Frburary, but don't hold me to it.

GUI Scripting

[X_Caffeine]

There's a good bit on Daring Fireball about GUI Scripting, a new feature of AppleScript that allows developers to control applications that do not have Applescript support. It's, um, weird.