On Mar 2, 2012, at 3:25 AM, Uli Kusterer wrote: > On 01.03.2012, at 06:26, Alex Zavatone wrote: >> Makes me wonder how AppleScript is still alive at Apple then. What, are >> there two people on it internally or only one? > > Apple tried to kill AppleScript ages ago. But some big groups of users (e.g. > pre-press) use it so extensively to automate their workflow that they had to > go back on that. My guess is that group is still large enough to take care of > that. > > Also, Apple Events are used extensively for launching applications and > documents, handing URLs to applications etc. I'd wager a guess that it would > be a lot of work at this point to remove those, and if you have Apple Events, > removing AppleScript working on top of it is unlikely to save much manpower. > > Cheers, > -- Uli Kusterer > "The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..." > http://www.zathras.de
Thanks Uli. While at Verizon (A big phone and now TV company in the US) I writing a GUI creation system that took structured designs in Illustrator and Photoshop and ended up creating functional screens and layout files in 10 languages and file formats with properly separated and optimized graphics. How did I do this? Mostly Applescript. And then I wrapped it in an Xcode app (thanks Shane). Automation of Illustrator, Photoshop, TextEdit, the Finder, SVN, turned a multi hour process into minutes and the developers were presented with optimized graphics and draw code in C, Javascript, Lua, JSON, XML, HTML, CSS, Excel format, etc…, etc…. Doing it in the interpreted, no compile required, AppleScript allowed me to develop and test faster. Being able to wrap it in an Xcode app allowed it to be a real and protected app that could be serialized to run on certain machines and not be stolen. AppleScript - though weird at times (can we KILL the set statement?) - has many many benefits. A video of it doing its thing is here: http://homepage.mac.com/zav/Zavatone-Production-Tool-Demo.mov In the gig after that, we had to convert 2000 SCOBOL screens into modern HTML, JSON and Javascript. Guess what? The tool we had from a certain vendor ignored certain super important factors. So, out comes the AppleScript again, and 3 months later, in a simple top to bottom parsing process with some REGEX shell scripts, I was able to create a script that would convert up to 400 screens in an hour. Here it is: http://homepage.mac.com/zav/Cobol-to-HTML-demo.m4v Killing AppleScript, though probably expensive for Apple to support, would be really really stupid. Cheers, - Alex Zavatone _______________________________________________ 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: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
