Last: place names
Next: absent minded musical map help requested
May 07, 2003
MCs smoke crack, I smoke aluminum!
I'm not normally one to drink from the Apple kool-aid (sysadminning OS9 networks tends to suck the fun out of computers), but I'm enjoying my new iBook immensely, and I've just realised it has a really powerful, easy programming language inside. For free.
I haven't bought a computer with a programming language included since DOS 6.22, with QuickBasic.
AppleScript now comes with a whole Studio of development tools, including an easy interface builder. I've been looking for a language to learn recently, as Perl is great, but doesn't build nice GUI clients easily. I was considering .NET and C#, but I think AppleScript trounces it.
AppleScript is a bit of a coup for Apple that they don't shout about. It isn't just a language, but a design idea - many/most programs implement a level of scriptable functionality, so you can use script juju to link pieces of functionality together from several different apps, the OS, web services, and hopefully Rendevous (which is also very exciting, even if I'm not quite sure why). And with OS X, it can talk to any of the other loosely-joined UNIX apps, including Perl if I get scared and need to do something hard.
A few niggles - AppleScript Studio isn't installed by default, and the documentation seems to suck. Even O'Reilly turn up nothing recent - some web articles at the devcenter. I think there are also a few compatibility problems, especially between 10.0, 10.1 and 10.2 - but the joy of this is that people can create their personal apps to do their bidding, maybe published, editable and hackable.
I'm also excited about Sherlock 3 - a piece of software I never really got. It seems to integrate with AppleScript well, and may help information sucking from the Internet.
Matt talks about the lack of easy-to-use programming languages, and I don't think AppleScript is the pancea, but it strikes me that you could weld together a point and click Visio-esque GUI, and create a world of live flow diagrams - read from this page, listen on this port, get the current iTune, send this to my blog, send an email...... and even better (smoking the crack pipe now), we have the hard part - the GUI. It's OmniGraffle. It's loaded to the gills with AppleScript. People have turned it into an RSS reader. AppleScript slices, and dices. You create an information cloud on your computer, and funnel it any which way.
OK, so tonight I try and build my first AppleScript app. Expect bad moods tommorow.
Trackbacks
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.anti-mega.com/cgi-bin/mt/addmttb.cgi/43
