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AppleScript for System Admins WebCast

Posted by pudge on from the tell-app-"Finder"-to-stop-crashing dept.

Justin Elliott writes "Watch Apple Computer's own AppleScript wizard, Sal Soghoian, present 'AppleScript For System Admins' during Mac OS X Labs' September 24 webcast. Learn about essential AppleScript tools and tips under Mac OS X. Discover how AppleScript can be used for administrative tasks, and how to use AppleScript to effectively interact with the Mac OS X file system."

4 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. Not available until next week by Corvus9 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Note that this site only contains connection information for a stream of a live presentation that will be performed on Sep. 24, 2003.

    You can download the webcast software, but will not be able to connect or see anything until 1 PM EDT next wednesday.

  2. Re:Don' Like AS by Meowing · · Score: 2, Informative

    Where are the shell scripts?

    What did you want to do from the shell? Some programs are designed to be used from a command line in the Unix way, others are happier being controlled via the GUI and OSA [which you can still get to from the shell using open(1) and osascript(1)]. Those commands won't completely eliminate Applescript, but they will let you stick mostly to sh and only bring in OSA where the target program demands it.

  3. AppleScript is hard to write by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    AppleScript is like Perl's forgotten twin brother: Perl is fast to write and impossible to read, and AppleScript is highly readable but impossible to keep "in your head" .. too much like a weird dialect of english.

    That being said it *rocks* for controlling GUI apps .. for instance you can generate diagrams in OmniGraffle diagramming tool entirely through scripts! I was trying to create a script to generate ERD from MySQL schema but gave up after a while because AppleScript is so chewy.

  4. Re:I like AppleScript, but... by scrotch · · Score: 3, Informative

    Serious question:
    Can Python (or Perl, or anything else) interact with other running OS X programs?

    That's why we've used Applescript with OS 9 so much. We can write scripts that tell Quark XPress what to do. We can pull info from FileMaker and format it and place it in Quark auto-magicly. We've written scripts that manipulate text in Quark text boxes without ever leaving Quark - like they're just another menu item. We can do similar things with Outlook Express and BBEdit and any number of other apps. I've written a bunch of Applescripts, but very few that didn't interact with at least one commercial application.

    Now if I can replace
    FileMaker <- Applescript -> Quark
    with
    MySQL <- Python/Perl/etc -> Quark
    that would seriously rock. Are you saying I can do that? Can you post a link to some info on getting started?