by Craig Smith A droplet is exactly what it sounds like; an icon (representing a script YOU write) you can drag and drop a file, a folder, or groups of either, and make something happen. They are extremely versatile, and as usual, you are only limited by your own imagination. For instance, my kids are amateur musicians that enjoy creating projects in GarageBand. When they have composed something interesting, I can drop the files onto a droplet...
by Kevin Bradley "HELP!" -- The Beatles Using Applescript to control your applications is both fun and useful, but finding the information you need to write those scripts can be trying. Many scripters are mystified by application dictionaries and rely instead on help from other coders or other scripts to "show them the way." When you need a script to work quickly, waiting for a response from another scripter can seem to take forever. There...
by Adam Bell In Leopard, Spotlight has become really powerful, but one of the problems with the Spotlight menu for finding things is that it is indiscriminant -- it finds everything with the search term in it even though you normally have at least some idea of where it is; in your Scripts folder, for example. The ability to search in a Finder window is very useful since these searches can be either by file name or by content and can be directed to occur only in the...
by Craig Smith Thanks to Ben Waldie's new book, Automator for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide, I now have a new friend in my circle of scripting. I know that a number of AppleScripters eschew Automator, and I admit that until I read Ben's book, I was a closet member of that group. Not anymore. Automator has some extremely cool, useful, and...
by Kevin Bradley "Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie." In my previous column I had to eat my own words where Automator was concerned. This month, apparently, I get to eat a dish of crow yet again, but on a different subject. Stick with me and I'll show you the error of my ways and perhaps you can profit from my meal of bird feet and black feathers. In March of...
by Adam Bell Not long ago, I wrote a collection of handlers for manipulating comments, categories and tags in an application called Journler. Deploying those presents a problem, however: how to present six handlers and have the user choose the best one for the job from among them and how to offer the user a brief explanation of each without presenting it every time. After some thought,...
by Adam Bell Nova Scotians are intensely interested in the weather, of which we have an abundance. "If you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes" is our mantra. This extreme variability is caused by the jet stream which meanders over our heads on its way out over the Atlantic Ocean from North America. When it is south of us, we freeze in arctic air and when north of us the weather moderates. Further, the jet stream drags the weather from much of North America...
by Craig Smith This discussion presumes a basic knowledge of MySQL in the Mac OS X environment. Specifically, this is directed toward so-called desktop application usage, not internet, or PHP applications. As you probably know, MySQL is frequently touted as the final solution for managing large amounts of data, and in obtaining lightning fast results to complex data queries. Part of the reason for that is that mySQL runs without a Graphical User Interface (GUI)...
by Kevin Bradley "Forget All That Other Stuff I Said" - Kevin Nealon If you're human (and who isn't?) you've certainly had the experience of spending perhaps a large amount of time and effort doing some kind of work only to find that there was a much simpler answer - but only after you finished doing it the hard way. I recently had that experience because I made the mistake of opening Apple's Automator. Today you get...
by Kevin Bradley The future will be better tomorrow. --Dan Quayle Welcome back to the second in our iCal series! Last time I showed you that making To Do items and Events were fairly straight-forward. Today I want to show you some nifty things you can do with alarms for Events and To Do's. The format for each type of alarm is the same no matter whether you are attaching it to a To Do or an Event (large 'E'), so you can apply the lessons here...
by Nigel Garvey The StandardAdditions OSAX - part of the standard Mac OS installation, includes a suite of six commands called File Read/Write. These are AppleScript's direct access to the contents of files. They allow data to be passed directly from a script to a file, or vice versa, without the intervention of an application. This article tells you all you need to know about them - and perhaps a lot that you...
by Adam Bell What is Growl? Growl is a very popular freeware global notification system written for OS X that installs itself as a preference pane and/or a menubar icon and menu. Applications use Growl to display small notifications...
by Kevin Bradley Scripting iCal I use iCal - a lot. I've got it reminding me of everything from doctor's appointments to my favorite TV shows. And it doesn't hurt that I can sync those alarms to my iPod, so I can be reminded if I'm not at the computer. But to tell you the truth, I hate using iCal to create my items. Yep, I'm dogging the iCal interface! Having to bounce around fields in the sidebar to set appointment info wasn't the best...
by Craig Smith ***UPDATED REVIEW*** The original version was published just weeks before Apple's un-announced release of iLife '08, which included an upgrade of iPhoto to version 7.0. A few months later, Apple released the announced Mac OS X version 10.5 (Leopard). Brian Webster of Fat Cat Software did a tremendous job of keeping iPhoto Library Manager up to date and relevant through these events....
by Adam Bell With the introduction of OS X, Apple's operating system was built on a BSD Unix foundation. Scary stuff for those of us who had never dealt with Unix before even if we were happy with AppleScript. We found a new application in the Utilities folder of the Applications folder called Terminal - a program that permitted direct interaction with the system through an interface called a shell; a program for talking to Unix...