On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 5:12 PM, Don Arnel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've only been working with a Mac running Leopard now for about 5 weeks and > am not familiar with AppleScript or the Script Editor. I ran the Script > Editor and dragged the iChat.app (since you said that app had lots of > handlers) file into it, but what am I looking for? I saw no scripting > interface. Am I doing it wrong? Is that how I was suppose to "drop it on > Script Editor"?
Scriptable applications provide what are known as "dictionaries" of their "terminology". You can open an application's dictionary using the Open Dictionary item on Script Editor's File menu. Under the hood, AppleScript is just a human-readable representation of Apple Events, which are the primitive IPC mechanism on Mac OS (well, if you don't want to talk about kernel-level IPC through mach ports or BSD-layer IPC with pipes and sockets, that is). Apple Events are somewhat analogous to Windows messages like WM_CLOSE, but they are a lot more structured and versatile. When you right-click and application's Dock icon and click Quit, for example, the OS is actually sending that app a Quit Apple Event. This is just like when you quit an application from the Task Manager in Windows (in that case, Windows posts a quit event to the app's message queue -- actually its first top-level window -- which is usually special-cased in the app's message pump). But the similarities pretty much end there. Windows also uses messages for a lot of internal message passing. Also, in Windows, pretty much everything is a window, and you can iterate through all the windows owned by any process you own (generalizing here in the context of security descriptors). Neither of these is the case on OS X. You have no access to another application's internal structures whatsoever; you only have access to what the application grants you, which in most cases is merely Apple Events/AppleScript. In this sense, Apple Events are used more like COM. Long story short, you're going to need to seriously retrain yourself for how OS X is architected. It is a very different beast from Windows. --Kyle Sluder _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
