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The Unlikely Persistence of AppleScript

A great article, and one I'll read again, but let me just say this: thank goodness AppleScript has survived. The number of things for which I rely on AppleScript every day is somewhere between 50 and 1000, and probably between 200 and 500 depending on how you define "things."

5 Responses to "The Unlikely Persistence of AppleScript"

  1. Wow. What do you use it for? In my 12 years of being a Mac user, I have found probably only 3-4 uses of it in that time.

  2. I run a lot of things through FastScripts with keyboard shortcuts.

    I spent a fair amount of my time on forums, so one of the scripts I use all the time scrapes the page and opens all the "new post" links in tabs. A simple script I've extended to ten or twelve forums.

    I have option-# set to trigger scripts in Mail to change the account from which I'm writing an email. Much faster than going into the popup menu.

    I have some scripts which re-set my preferred window sizes and locations in several apps.

    Safari alone has several scripts which will do things like "Google page URL" - much easier than selecting the page url, hitting copy, hitting cmd-L, and pasting it in (I use this to find duplicate threads on The Sand Trap, most often).

    I used to have one for "Tweet" that I still use sometimes because clicking "Twitter" in the "Share" menu is more tedious than a keystroke.

    When I'm developing a site I have a keystroke in BBEdit that saves the document, then "opens" it with Transmit (which just uploads it to the site). With the option key held down it'll also reload the front page in Safari after three seconds to display the change. 🙂

    Basically, every time I find myself doing something often enough that it's annoying, I try to AppleScript a solution to it, and tie it to a keyboard shortcut when possible.

  3. Wow, that's neat. I had no idea you could do all of that with AppleScript!

  4. IM me if you want and I'll share some examples. I'll write up my post on my forum script now…

  5. [...] mentioned in the comments on this post that I'd write this up, so here goes. What follows is an AppleScript I activate via FastScripts [...]