Script Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Daily Mac App: Final Draft

by Michael Grothaus (Oct 5th, 2011)

Final Draft 8, the industry-standard scriptwriting software, has finally come to the Mac App Store. Even for those of you who have never written a movie script, you've seen the fruits of labor of the app used by those writers. Before Christian Bale utters a menacing threat to a criminal in a ...

Use Dropbox to backup a few folders every day

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Nov 23rd, 2010)

There's a nice little tutorial on Justin Schwalbe's blog for using a simple script to backup a few folders to a Dropbox backup folder every day. Why would you do this? Well, let's say you aren't always able to connect to a hard drive for Time Machine, but you have a couple of document folders you ...

iOS 4.0 firmware release expected momentarily, quick Terminal tip to check

by Erica Sadun (Jun 21st, 2010)

Last year, we showed you how to check for the 3.0 firmware release via the terminal command line. As we move into the new year, TUAW reader Mike K writes in, saying "Being compulsive, is the terminal command to check for 3.0 the same as for 4.0? I'd love to know..." Hey Mike, yes the terminal ...

Sikuli can automate any UI by taking screenshots

by Mike Schramm (Feb 1st, 2010)

This is pretty impressive --of course there are already lots of ways to automate actions on your Mac, and odds are that you may have messed around with scripting or Automator more than once before. But Sikuli is a new app that makes automating as simple as taking screenshots. Instead of programming ...

AppleScript: Exploring the power of Folder Actions, part III

by Cory Bohon (Mar 26th, 2009)

So far in this AppleScript feature we've covered what folder actions are and how to create them. In this AppleScript post, I'm going to tell you how to create your own custom scripts and add them to your folder actions list. If you work with file permissions a lot, then you know how crazy it can ...

Random Signatures with TextExpander and AppleScript

by Brett Terpstra (Feb 2nd, 2009)

TextExpander, a $29.95US utility which inserts snippets of text or images when you type a preset string of characters, has long been a TUAW favorite. I only recently learned that it can run AppleScripts within a snippet, which opened up a world of fun for me. Here's a quick script demonstrating how ...

Mac Automation: saving Automator workflows

by Cory Bohon (Jan 1st, 2008)

Now that you've been introduced to Automator, let's let's get into the "nitty-gritty." In the previous Automator post, we learned how to make a workflow that would take photos from your camera, import them into iPhoto, then allow you to e-mail them. Let's look at the three ways in which you can save ...

AppleScript: Finder commands

by Cory Bohon (Dec 29th, 2007)

Now that you've mastered the tell command, it's time to introduce some of the other AppleScript commands that you may encounter. Location command This command will allow you to open a specific location (either on your Mac or on a web server). This command is most often used with the Finder. For ...

AppleScript: the Script Editor

by Cory Bohon (Dec 27th, 2007)

Before you can build your first AppleScript you need to know some basics: what a script-able application is and how to use the Script Editor. Script-able Applications Basically, script-able applications are applications in which the developer has included a set of "instructions" that the Script ...

Saving iPhone applications inside data URLs

by Mike Schramm (Jul 19th, 2007)

This is really basically the same theory as the iPhone bookmarklets Mat posted earlier (squeezing content into a URL), but it's a little less about function and a little more about storage. Currently, the iPhone doesn't allow you to save actual files locally, but it does allow you save URLs, so the ...

Platypus: create Mac applications from Ruby, Perl, shell scripts, etc.

by Mat Lu (May 8th, 2007)

MacResearch has posted a nice two part tutorial on using Platypus, a neat utility that allows you to "create native, flawlessly integrated Mac OS X applications from interpreted scripts." This include shell scripts, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc. With Platypus you can turn command-line only tools into ...

PackRat 1.1 adds AppleScript and Automator support

by David Chartier (Apr 11th, 2007)

Someone must have answered Rod Schmidt's call for AppleScripters, as he has just released PackRat 1.1, a major update to his offline Backpack syncing app that brings double-whammy support for both AppleScript and Automator. You can now get almost all your Backpack data via script, which means power ...

iTunes AppleScript to batch edit video metadata

by David Chartier (Nov 6th, 2006)

iTunes 7 ushered in some great new video metadata, but editing this information, especially when in batches, can sometimes be a pain. For example: iTunes can differentiate between "movies" and "tv shows," (just check your Sources list on the left) but trying to select 14 episodes of an Aqua Teen ...

iTunes song tagging redux

by David Chartier (Sep 30th, 2006)

We reported a method for tagging iTunes tracks and creating on-the-fly playlists way back in January. However, it involved using Quicksilver and a couple of home-grown scripts, but we can dig it if some of y'all aren't down with a tool as broad-reaching as Quicksilver. Fortunately for the rest of ...

An Adium Xtra for linking any browser's current page

by David Chartier (Sep 30th, 2006)

I know Adium can insert links from some browsers by itself, but I just found a script at the Adium Xtras site which offers much more fine-grained control over inserting a link from any browser, with the page name's descriptive title linked nice and clean, instead of the long ugly URL you get from ...