hi guys,
for my final project in my grade 12 computer science class, we need to learn a language, teach a bit about it to the class, and write a final program to show off the language. As I’m sure you could guess, i chose to use applescript. I was just wondering if anyone has any suggestions for a final program for the project, or suggestions on little things that i could show the class to demonstrate the power of AppleScript. I do have experience with it, iv made quite a few scripts, and studied even more.
thanks,
Z
Model: PowerBook G4
AppleScript: 1.10.3
Browser: Safari 417.8
Operating System: Mac OS X (10.4)
In the real world, the power of AS is in automation. For instance, I have a little script set up to trigger by Mail when particular emails come into my mailbox. If that message fits the parameters, the attachment is automaticaly saved to a new folder (generated by the script) and printed out. That would be the most showy thing, in my opinion. Maybe you could do it with a video or photos or music. Something that simply ran all by itself based on some sort of trigger.
I allways loved AS’ ability to control various apps with a few lines of code in a row. For example: check mail, the grab some news feeds and place them in a dir as text files, then backup some stuff to a FTP dir, then play something in iTunes (or from a Studio app in a QTMovieView), etc. So, I would choose for a demonstration some easy tasks in a bunch of different applications.
I allways remember, BTW, my first serious project. A rule in Outlook (read Entourage, Mail or whatever) launched an app, which would read certain received messages for a special string containing a full path to a document in the local network. It then opened such doc in Quark, print a postscript, produce a PDF thru Distiller, then attach it back to the original sender of the message. From the user-point-of-view, you were sending a list of documents to a email address, then receiving some time later the final PDF, which was a groovy thing in OS 8.6 days, when lots of people was wasting lots of time waiting for their postscripts/pdfs being produced
I am going to have to agree with Craig on this one guys. The real power of Applescript is in Automation of tasks.
Yes, the things you can do inside of iTunes is neat… but come on. Unless you are working with music files for a living - how automated can you be.
I would suggest illustrating the power of Applescript using multiple programs to accomplish a task. Perhaps taking a folder of images, dropping it onto a hotfolder and having Image Events generate thumbnails of all the high res files, extracting the file names and creating a web gallery on the fly … then sending an email off to a user saying that thier webgallery is now online and available for viewing. While doing the presentation of the power of AppleScript’s automation, you could then, if you time your presentation properly, end it with the script kicking off a song in iTunes for that extra “Bam!” (sorry, Emeril.)
