Scripting Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Timed command-line screenshots

by Erica Sadun (May 20th, 2013)

A TUAW staffer recently asked if there were a way to snapshot the exact same region of the screen over and over at timed intervals without buying third-party software. There is, but it depends on your comfort with the command line. If you're experienced in Unix scripting, read on. If not, you may ...

Extract App Resource Icons with AppleScript

by Ben Waldie (Apr 22nd, 2013)

Whether I'm preparing for a demo or writing an article, blog post, book, or technical documentation, I often find myself performing the same set of repetitive steps. I need to navigate into an app's packaged resources folder, find one or more icon files, occasionally convert them to PNG and scale ...

AppleScripting OmniFocus > Send completed task report to Evernote 2

by Ben Waldie (Apr 15th, 2013)

In February, I provided instructions for using AppleScript to send completed task reports from OmniFocus to Evernote. The script was quite well-received by readers, and I've had numerous requests for enhancements. This post provides an updated version of the script, which includes a number of ...

More Tips for Troubleshooting Automator Workflows

by Ben Waldie (Mar 11th, 2013)

In my last post, I shared some useful tips for troubleshooting Automator workflow problems. I didn't cover everything, though. There are lots of other ways you can troubleshoot your workflow. Here are some more tips to help. 1. Use Get Selected Finder Items Wisely Automator workflows are ...

Python 3.2 lets you write Python on the iPhone

by Mike Schramm (Nov 19th, 2012)

We've posted before about Codea, an iPad app that allows you to code and create LUA scripts. And now here's a new iPhone app called Python 3.2 that, as you might imagine, allows coders to write Python scripts through iOS. The app runs Python 3.2.3 and serves as a full development environment ...

VoodooPad 5: wiki magic

by Brett Terpstra (Apr 26th, 2012)

For those of us who nerd out about things like desktop wikis, VoodooPad 5 (from the creator of Acorn) is an exciting release. It brings new capabilities so powerful that they should come with a "for good, not evil" warning. If you're not familiar with VoodooPad, it's a desktop wiki with media ...

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 ...