I am happy to report that in a total of about 4 hours I managed to get my first AppleScript project up and running and doing what I want it to do. Partly thanks to the response I got from you guys, I was able to get it done and amaze myself. This AppleScript thing is really cool, I suspect that I will be spending many hours making little tools for myself. I will ofcourse submit all tools for everyone to use.
This first project is a script that I call using a hotkey, after selecting messages in Mail.app. The script takes the senders’ email address from each of the selected messages, fetches the full name of the person with that email address from Address Book and moves the message to the folder with that name if it exists.
An issue I deal with right now is multiple matches in Address Book, by simply not moving the message. In the future, I would like to have the user select which contact to use. Also in the future, I plan to check for multiple mailboxes with the same name (for instance one in the current and one in my archives) and have the user also select which mailbox to use.
My current issue however is the following:
Right now I just append results from the script to a string and display dialog this string after completion of the script. Which is all good, because the script performs well for me. However, before I submit it I want it to have a proper interface, which for instance displays a ‘progress bar’ (that swirling blue candy stick thingy, sorry - i’m a switcher, i don’t know the mac lingo yet) when busy and lets the user confirm the planned moves before actually doing them. I figured this to be very possible, when checking out Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts
So my question is:
Although I haven’t written any scripts recently, in the past I’ve been writing perl scripts in vi. Needless to say I personally prefer to write scripts in a simple editor, I tend to get overwhelmed by development environments. From the FAQ I kinda figured I need to use Xcode to build a user interface. Is this true? Or is it possible, doable and easy to script an interface myself in Script Editor?