Mar 14 2008
Apple has announced their World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), which will take place in San Francisco on June 9 – 13th. For all those who’ve been chomping at the bit to learn more about the iPhone, this should be a great opportunity to be immersed in technology, tools and toys!
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Mar 13 2008
So enough of the introductions (see Part 1 and Part 2), let’s get on with the code. To get started, let’s look at how to use scripting additions from within rb-appscript as the application that I have in mind will need to display a dialog box (which is located in Standard Additions). We can get a list of the additions currently available as well as a list of commands using the following Ruby code:
Continue reading...
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Mar 13 2008
In Part 1 of this series I walked through the steps to install rb-appscript, a scripting bridge that provides an alternative to AppleScript for controlling scriptable applications on a Mac.
My intention in exploring an alternative was to find an option for scripting beyond AppleScript itself and to rewrite an AppleScript program that I was currently using. The original AppleScript code was written to turn down the volume upon shutdown, to enable a silent bootup process. You can read the who, what and why in the original post.
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Mar 12 2008
AppleScript is a scripting language that provides the ability to control “scriptable” applications on a Mac. AppleScript provides an interface to the Apple Event messaging architecture, the means by which applications communicate with one another as well as the underlying OS.
Mar 11 2008
It’s been a long wait, however, as of today you can now get your hands on the latest update to the AppleScript Language Guide. The copy that I’ve been using for the past 6 months is dated 1999. Yikes! 
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Mar 11 2008
One thing I was accustomed to when working on Windows, was copying a section of a webpage and pasting the same into a Word document. Word did a pretty good job of keeping the formatting intact, including images, fonts and the like. This trick is handy when you want to print only a portion of a webpage.
You can get there from here on a Mac, albeit with a different approach as to the internal implementation.
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Mar 10 2008
In a previous post I wrote about the Fink package manager. MacPorts is another popular tool for installing and managing open source software on Mac OS X. There are a number of overlaps with the two packages, however, they are not one in the same. 
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