Referencing an application indirectly

I have a collection of Photoshop Actions that I need to update. Unfortunately, Adobe keeps changing the name of the application, so every year I have to modify and recompile all 93 actions and, honestly, it’s tedious.

Ideally, I’d like to just store the name of the application in a text file somewhere, load it into a variable and then use that variable in all my tell blocks instead of the hard-coded name. As you may already know “ and which I just found out “ this doesn’t work. Any suggestions for a work-around?

Address apps by id rather than name. It’s generally better in scripts you distribute for a variety of reasons. So:

tell application id "com.adobe.Photoshop" 

Thanks Shane, that works great. I didn’t realize you could do that.

However, I also didn’t realize that I’m still screwed by the plist file, which needs to have the application name in it. I can easily batch change those with BBEdit, but I still have to re-compile everything. Can you think of any way to make that bit independent of Application name changes?

Thanks! This is very helpful!

Can you just say Photoshop in the property list file?