I’m digging deeper into AppleScript studio this morning. It’s really starting to blow my mind. The basic concept is simple: take the power of Cocoa applications, object oriented applications that can tap all the built in frameworks to add lots of power to your application, and build an application on top of them — specifying the actions to be executed using the English like syntax of AppleScript. This is so much more powerful than just providing GUI for AppleScript. It’s like getting PowerBuilder, my old programming language, dropped into my lap all over again.
I’m going through the tutorial now and am noting differences between “old-school” AppleScript under Mac OS X and the new AppleScript Studio. Some starters:
- You write AppleScript Studio applications in Project Builder and do the user interface in Interface Builder. This gives you access to a lot of features, like…
- …a built in debugger!
- It looks like it’s now up to the developer to make source for AppleScript Studio applications available as a separate file. Under old AppleScript, you could distribute an AppleScript “application” that was doubleclickable but could also be opened by Script Editor if the recipient wanted to see how you did something.
- A small point: the “display dialog” command now creates a window that has a proper title bar.
Over the next few days I’ll be going through this stuff in more detail (while I’m writing my last paper of the semester) and will post my findings.