On Jun 13, 2007, at 12:38 AM, William D. Bandes wrote:
I don't know much about AppleScript, but I have made extensive use of the "record" feature. Just set the Script Editor in "record" mode, go through a series of steps to do a particular job, save as "Run Only, never show startup screen," and you have made an application which will do a given job on demand. I have more than a dozen of these to shorten my work. So this is indeed "user friendly" although I cannot program in AppleScript - the "editor" does it for me. In particular, TexEdit+ is useful here because it is scriptable and will do a lot of text operations automatically when it has been used in a "record" with the Script Editor.
Record is very handy, but requires that the application in question support recording. Most appear not to. Even many (I dare say most) of Apple's own applications do not support AppleScript Recording.
Despite AppleScript being not as user friendly as it was intended to be, it is still far far better than any comparable option on Windows. The closest thing Windows has is the Windows Scripting Host which is (in my opinion) even worse to write things in than AppleScript, and has no where near the power or wide support that AS has (there are also Batch files in Windows, but they have very limited usefulness, and in terms of OS X, are about the same as an OS X shell script, only a shell script, just like AppleScript, is more powerful than its closest windows counterpart).
So what all this means is, I love AppleScript, it just isn't anywhere close to as user friendly as it was intended to be, and can at times be downright stubborn and confusing to get a given script to work exactly right with a given application.
But if it wasn't for AppleScript, I'd have a massive amount more work to do during a day. I have almost all my repetitive daily tasks converted into AppleScripts and running automatically. Without them, I'd probably waste about 4 hours a day manually doing all the work. Instead I use them, along with cron scheduling, and almost all my daily report and maintenance tasks get done in the wee hours of the morning while no one is around, and since they are done entirely by a computer by itself, they also get the task done much faster than I could do them myself (its fun to watch things like FileMaker spit out data and Excel import it and do all its own layout formatting and then save itself, zip all the files, and send out emails with those files attached to the group of people that want to see the daily reports. Work that would take me 30+ minutes for each project flys by in about 5 minutes).
-chris <www.mythtech.net> ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
