In part 1 of this series I demonstrated how to create a short Java application in NetBeans that communicated, using AppleScript, to the Mac apple event system. The application was a no thrills look into how to invoke the TextEdit application. Despite the brevity of the application it provided the foundation for this next tip, which will build on the ideas to create something a little more salient, as in, something that you might actually find yourself using.

The gist of the application is to instruct iTunes to play a random song, move to the next song, pause, etc. I’ll show one use of the application by wrapping the code into a bash script that allows you to invoke the program (and all commands) from within a terminal. Watch the video that follows for all the details…

This application is all of about 80 lines, including the bash script. Sometimes a little creative thinking and a few lines of code are all that’s needed to write an intriguing (and hopefully useful) application.

---

The music in the video is Led Zeppelin and the song: Moby Dick. Led Zeppelin at Amazon

Technorati Tags: AppleScript, Cocoa, Java, netbeans, screencast

A few weeks back I demonstrated how to write Ruby code inside NetBeans to control scriptable applications on a Mac, that is, communicate between Ruby and the Apple Event system. In this post, I will turn things around a bit from the previous post and use NetBeans and Java to execute AppleScript.

There is a subtle difference, in the previous post the focus was on how to write code in Ruby (inside NetBeans) using the rb-appscript bridge. This time around the approach is to work with Java and pass AppleScript code to a set of Cocoa files (classes) that will act as the bridge between our application and the Mac system.

There is one caveat - the Cocoa-Java API is deprecated as of Mac OS X Tiger. The NSAppleScript and NSMutableDictionary classes are still available, however, they are no longer on the development path within Apple. There are scripting bridges that allow you to control scriptable applications using Python, Ruby, and Objective-C. Java Native Interface (JNI) is an additional option to call platform specific code. You can read more about JNI in this technical note: JNI development on Mac OS X.

One more note, if you follow the steps in this video and the classes NSAppleScript and NSMutableDictionary are shown with lines through them (for example, NSAppleScript), this has to do with a preference setting inside NetBeans to show deprecated classes with a strike-through. You can change this as follows: From the Preferences dialog, choose Fonts/Colors; click the Syntax option; from the Language list choose Java; click on Deprecated Element; in the Effects option, choose None.

Join me in Part 2 of this tip where I’ll show a more comprehensive (read: interesting) example where it’s all about controlling iTunes using Java.

---

The music in the video is Led Zeppelin and the song: Moby Dick.
Click the image to see more about about Led Zeppelin and the CD (at Amazon)

Technorati Tags: AppleScript, Cocoa, Java, netbeans, screencast