Ask HN: What are you using AppleScript for? Considering how popular MacOS laptops are with developers, it's curious to me that I haven't come across much usage of AppleScript. I use it to hook up various actions to the TouchBar with BetterTouchTool (https://folivora.ai/) and have done some iTunes related scripts in the past to clean up or improve my library. Are you doing anything useful / fun with AppleScript? |
It was super handy for that sort of thing.
Sort of miss it, in a maybe-masochist kind of way.
Open tools to HTML are much nicer. And much less bizarre.
If anyone has some hairy InDesign or Quark or Illustrator thing they need automated, let me know.
...
...personally? lots of useful hotkeys.
But the shit keyboards finally drove me away. Linux on a XPS13 now.
I don't miss AppleScript the language. But I do miss the fact that it was sorta built into everything by default.
It has pretty good AppleScript coverage (from looking at the dictionary) but I've never used most of it.
Mostly used AppleScript to call 'do javascript'.
Currently reimplementing Carbon AEDescs in pure Swift, to see if a modern high-level IPC framework that works across macOS, iOS, and Marzipan apps is feasible. (https://twitter.com/hhas02/status/1124763874413174786)
Developers generally hate AppleScript because it deliberately misleads them into believing Apple event IPC is OOP, then drives them absolutely nuts by acting in all sorts of very un-OO ways. However, once you realize that it’s not OOP at all, but RPC plus simple first-class relational queries… oh the possibilities. Interesting times.
The AppleScript support was there maybe even before Illustrator was available for Windows.
Not going to look at either API. And, I don't have a current Illustrator.
...but I can guess with certainty that the javascript API gets more attention within Adobe. And that it has a more solid future.
AppleScript may never disappear from Illustrator or macOS. But it _does not_ have a bright, vibrant future.