I know this will seem first grade to most of you, but I have only just gotten back into scripting after a several years ‘break in the action’. And I am having a bit of trouble with making things work in OS X. I need a simple script for a countdown timer. All I need is to have the script - saved as an app on my desktop - open up with a window that lets me set the time in hours, minutes and seconds. Then click the button and begin. Then at zero, I want it to set the system volume to maximum, open dialog window that says “Time is up”, begin playing the system beep over and over until I click the button.
For all of you who do this every day I am sure it sounds amazingly simplistic. For this old fart, who hasn’t written a script longer than 8 lines in several years it is a big deal. For those who are annoyed at this request, I apologize. And I am not on my home computer so I don’t have my script to copy and paste here. So any suggestions are appreciated, and I will post what I have done already when I get home this evening.
Thanks NovaScotian, Watch It does almost exactly what I want. I will go ahead and buy it so I can use it until I get my script done. I still want to do the script so I can ‘re-learn’ AppleScript. I am hoping to use it for a number of other things and this was my warm-up project. I thought it would be very simple. But I forgot who I was dealing with… me!
I try to keep the learning process going at all times. But being busy all the time sometimes just gets me dizzy. Between a full-time job, running a part-time business (a hypnotherapy clinic), and learning to do web sites, and now getting back into AS, it sometimes seems that the faster I go the behinder I get.
This might give you a few ideas, Jmax (although it won’t override computer sleep). Save it as a Stay Open application…
property reset : true
set reset to true
on idle
if reset then
set reset to false
repeat
try
tell (display dialog "Enter a countdown time (hrs:mins:secs):" default answer "00:00:10")'s ¬
text returned to tell (word 1) * hours + (word 2) * minutes + (word 3) to if it > 0 then return it
on error number n
if n is -128 then return quit
end try
end repeat
else
set volume 7
repeat
beep
if not (display dialog "Time up!" buttons {"OK"} default button 1 giving up after 2)'s gave up then return quit
end repeat
end if
end idle
