Scripting Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Ask TUAW Video Edition: Geeking on GeekTool

by Justin Esgar (May 10th, 2011)

It's Tuesday, which means it's time for another edition of Ask TUAW video! On the heels of our AppleScript episode, we are going to talk today about GeekTool. GeekTool is a great way to have information displayed on your desktop, without it being too intrusive. First thing, you need to download ...

Ask TUAW Video Edition: PDF and Scripting

by Justin Esgar (Mar 29th, 2011)

Andrew asked us about how to have a folder convert documents to PDF format so that he can sync them to his Dropbox. Today's show goes into how to use Automator and AppleScript to do some scripting, and we're going to demonstrate an iPad app that will convert documents for you on your ...

Mobiola WebCamera gets localization, AppleScript support

by Steven Sande (Dec 3rd, 2010)

It's always nice when developers respond to the suggestions of reviewers. A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of Mobiola Web Cam from SHAPE Services. It's a combination of an iPhone app and a desktop (Windows and Mac) client that turns your iPhone into a webcam. At one point in my review, I suggested ...

Terminal Tips: bash cron script to keep an app running

by TJ Luoma (Oct 21st, 2010)

Do you have some apps that you want to keep running all the time? If so, and if you're not afraid of the Terminal or the command line, I have a script for you. When I come home at the end of the day, Dropbox has stopped running on my iMac. I'm running the latest version, and it works fine on my ...

Yuma: New scripting tool for web developers

by Steven Sande (Jul 15th, 2008)

To web developers, scripting is the glue that connects web pages and back-end systems. For example, PHP is a very popular scripting environment that has been used to write web apps like WordPress and phpBB. For those of you who use PHP, you know that it is a dynamic, weakly-typed hypertext ...

AppleScript: Integrating shell scripts

by Cory Bohon (Jun 23rd, 2008)

We've talked about AppleScript how-tos before. AppleScript is fun and all, but what if you already know how to write shell scripts? Well, did you know that by integrating shells scripts into AppleScript, you can create simple applications that do useful things? It's true, and I am going to show ...

Speedy creation of rich text links to Mail messages

by Brett Terpstra (Apr 14th, 2008)

If you use any applications with Cocoa-based text editors (TextEdit, Mail.app, and many more), you may have noticed that some of them, like Mail.app, recognize URLs and automatically turn them into links. The links are in Rich Text Format (RTF) and can be copied and pasted into other RTF-compatible ...

Create your own iPhone remote application

by Mike Schramm (Aug 23rd, 2007)

One of the good things about the "very sweet solution" of iPhone development is that you don't need any special tools or too much knowhow to create neat applications-- if you know a little HTML, a little PHP, and have access to a text editor, you can come up with some pretty cool stuff. This ...

Trick your iPhone voicemail into using voice recording data

by Erica Sadun (Aug 9th, 2007)

The other day, I discussed how to record audio on your iPhone. Several people wrote in asking whether they could have their recordings show up in voicemail, so I scouted around a bit. I discovered that voicemail is stored in ~/Library/Voicemail and that it uses an sqlite3-compatible database to ...

Open man pages from Xcode

by Mike Schramm (Jul 30th, 2007)

Toxic Software's posted a useful little script if you spend any amount of time in Xcode-- because manopen is having trouble with Leopard, John punched up a shell/Applescript to open man pages directly from within Xcode's command line. It's tiny (and doesn't really do much-- just opens an Xcode Help ...

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 ...

Terminal Tip: "Now Playing" info from the command line

by Erica Sadun (Apr 2nd, 2007)

Have you ever wondered whether there was a command line way to check iTunes and determine which song is currently playing. The command-line osascript utility makes this an easy problem to solve. Osascript executes AppleScript commands from Terminal's command line and can run many of the same kinds ...

PackRat dev calls for AppleScripters

by David Chartier (Mar 25th, 2007)

Rod Schmidt, developer of PackRat, has issued a call for AppleScripters who are interested in automating his rocking Backpack client. PackRat, to my knowledge, doesn't have AppleScript support yet, but that does seem to be at the top of the request list and would mark another powerful feature ...

TUAW Tip: enable the AppleScript menu

by David Chartier (Aug 8th, 2006)

As I was working on an AppleScript-related post this morning, I couldn't seem to find any TUAW Tips in our vast archives that explained how to enable that AppleScript menubar item (pictured) that is mentioned so often in Mac software circles. This, of course, called for just such a tip. So: the ...

Griffin releases Proxi 1.0

by Dave Caolo (May 25th, 2006)

Back in April we wrote about the public beta of Proxi, which is the easy-to-use scripting software from Griffin Technology. Proxi lets you automate complicated routines, much like Automator or QuicKeys. Earlier this week, Griffin released version 1.0 of Proxi. Changes to version 1.0 include support ...