General Questions About Applescript's validity

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

To provide a little background, I’m a production artist working with Adobe Illustrator and use applescript to automate quite a bit of my job.

I’ve been a scripting novice for the last year or so and I’m starting to run into various problems with OS 10.7.5 that have hard to track down solutions, such as simply being able to create a text file. Apparently after 10.7 there are errors with file permissions and being able to work around seems like quite the hassle for such a simple task. Will this type of problem continue to pop up? There also seem to be a lot of compatibility options with previous OS versions, and discussion about less and less being supported as apple continues to release updates to the OS.

My question being, is apple script still valid? Is there another language/solution that I should explore that would help me share these scripts and automation solutions with coworkers on different versions of the software? Most of what I do is fairly simple, i.e. accessing small databases for information and manipulating files & path/text elements in Illustrator.

Apologies if this is the wrong forum, if so a point in the right direction would be appreciated.

Cheers.

#2

There is no small amount of irony in asking “is Applescript valid” to a forum that’s mainly devoted to Applescript. Things sometimes become broken by changes in the OS or in the Creative Suite. It would be easier to obtain advice about the specific broken code. Alternatively, just stop upgrading. I use Applescript in OS 10.4 with Adobe CS (version 1) with nary a problem. :wink:

#3

AppleScript is very entrenched in the desktop publishing world. Newspapers and magazines frequently use it to automate pagination, flow in ads, etc. I would expect it to be supported for the near future, and quite likely beyond.

#4

You are not the first person to ask this, it was kicked around a lot when ASOC came out. I believe that AS will continue to be around and useful as ever. Yes there are some version compatibility issues, and differences in 3rd party applications (Adobe apps surely, I’ve lived through some big ugly scripting changes with CS). Yes you should continue to develop anything you need to. Be prepared to learn more as the environment/OS/apps change. ASOC does a heck of a lot more than vanilla Applescript, but it does require a lot more skill.