Scripting a third party application

Hi, I work for a newspaper company and we use an third party application to manage our ads. From what I know, it is scriptable, I have seen its dictionary, but I haven’t been successfull at using any of its standard commands. I can write a simple script to activate the application, but that’s about all the communication I can have with it. From what I know, the distribution company is not very coopertive in giving us this type of support, so I was wondering if there is another way to communicate with the application but not with AppleScript, maybe using XCode or something else. I’m a total newbie to the MAC environment, a complete PC junkie if you may, so any help will be appreciated. Thanks!

Hi, AppleScript is a relativly simple programming language. It can be used to automate tasks, and you can even use it to create your own programs.

You seem to already know how to ‘tell’ a program to ‘activate’, all you need to do is to learn how to command it to do something else.

This is a simple sample script that tells you how many items are on the desktop:

tell application "Finder"
	activate
	set itemCount to count items of desktop
	display dialog itemCount
end tell

(I find it’s good to have an example to work off of, even if it isn’t exactly what you are looking for.)

First, I need to know what program you are trying to script, and what exact command are you trying to do. It would help alot if you could post parts of the dictionary here. (I think that’s allowed, isn’t it?)