Dear All,
I am afraid I must bow out of these forums, just as I was getting the hang of it.
Mac’s are banned where I work (apparently the IT department doesn’t trust them for security / virus reasons!:/).
I was using Applescript to run a whole lot of work-based scripts, which I will really struggle with in Windows-World.
In particular, I had scripts to:
Control multiple Quicktime players
Control DVD player
Developed a GUI in XCode to allow video analysis from above videos
Display images side-by-side for stereoscopic viewing
Apply colour filters to multi-page TIFF files
Look up distance from A to B for a list of postcodes (using Multimap or Google maps)
and many more.
Does anyone know of a Windows-based scripting environment that would allow me to achieve similar things?
Is it as easy to develop GUI interfaces in such an environment?
Is there a language that largely resembles Applescript, to minimise the re-learning I will have to do?
I’m sorry to hear that Macs are banned where you are. Apparently your IT guys are actually afraid that if your network was all Macs they would be out of a job. As far as I know macs are much more secure than any peecee.
As an alternative the only thing I can think of is the Visual Basic Scripting. I’m only familiar with it from Illustrator and it’s scripting guide. We have pc’s and macs here and I think some of the programs in pc are scriptable through this. How versitile it is - I do not know.
I believe that’s true, in an alternate universe. Anyhow, look at Visual Basic, as PreTech said, for GUI projects, and using VBScript within Windows Script Host gives you considerable system-level control (check out “Windows 2000 Windows Script Host” by Tim Hill, published by New Riders - might be slightly outdated but it’s served me well). Also, there’s always Active Perl.
My own experience with this attitude (in a situation where I was in a position to actually prevent it as Principal of a college of a University) was that the IT folks had invested years in learning to care for PCs and a cluster of IBM servers and rarely, if ever, had to deal with Macs - in reality, didn’t know anything about them. Given that the Faculty of Architecture in the college used them exclusively and wasn’t going to switch any time soon, I simply funded an IT person for them. One big hitch to the inclusion of Macs in the mix was that we had a limited number of seats for some of the more expensive Engineering software much of which was Windows stuff, certainly couldn’t afford (or even find) two versions, and couldn’t control number of seats occupied from the server system we were using which was Novell Netware-based. Architecture had to be set up separately with its own server. Guys like me who used a Mac were basically on our own, and didn’t have access to some of the local network services; only to those on UNIX servers like email, Meeting Maker, etc. Fortunately, the university to which we had a fiber connection didn’t feel that way, so we got other services from the central servers.