Archive for March, 2008

Mar 14 2008

Apple Developer Conference!

Published by under Events

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

Ruby, an AppleScript Alternative – Part 3

Published by under Ruby

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:
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Mar 13 2008

Ruby, an AppleScript Alternative – Part 2

Published by under Ruby

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

Ruby, an AppleScript Alternative – Part 1

Published by under Ruby

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.

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Mar 11 2008

AppleScript 2.0 Language Guide

Published by under AppleScript

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

Copy/Paste from Safari

Published by under Safari,System

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

MacPorts Package Manager

Published by under Tools/Utilities

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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