Jarrett House North: Scripting

Tagging and iTunes: a roundup

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 20:48:48 GMT

As someone whose digital music collection keeps growing (now filling, despite my previous pledge, all but 15 GB on a 270 GB drive), I am always alert for new ways of managing the mountain of music. One trick that has been productive has been putting track metadata, including lists of musicians, actual recording dates, and keywords like “cover” or “remix,” in the Comments field of each track. This is a more staggering task than even I imagined, for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is the domain: even rock bands usually have north of four people involved in a given song, and when you look to jazz tracks, the task of manual data entry becomes huge. Also, unlike with iPhoto (or Flickr or del.icio.us), there is no concept of a discrete “tag” for a music track—in iTunes or anywhere else, as far as I can tell. Everything must live inside an unstructured comments field. So each item must be added manually, and God forbid you want to remove a tag from more than one item.

I had created an AppleScript to cope with the first challenge, a simple script that puts a user-defined keyword at the end of the comments block. But in a recent MacOSXHints article and its comments, I was exposed to a host of other solutions and am convinced it will be easier for me just to adopt someone else’s approach.

I’m tempted by the approach of managing iTunes tagging with Quicksilver, but I have actually given up using Quicksilver as it tends to slow to a crawl on my 1GHz G4 PowerBook. The approach of Common Tater looks good, but I’d rather have a small atomic script than a monolithic application, and it hasn’t been updated in quite a while. TuneTags has the same objection, plus the fact that its XML-like markup is too big to fit comfortably inside the meager 255 characters given for comments on a track.

I look forward to checking out Christopholis’s TuneTag (no relation) and the Add/Remove Tags scripts from dwipal. But ultimately the AppleScript solutions will need to yield to either a cross-platform iTunes plugin with a consistent tag separator methodology (semicolons? asterisks? XML? <T>?) or to a dedicated tag feature implemented by Apple. I’ve never understood why iTunes never got tags and iPhoto has had them since the beginning.

New iTunes script: Increment Playcount

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 02:32:43 GMT

I’ve uploaded a bare bones AppleScript that I’ve found useful over the past few weeks. The script, Increment Playcount, does what it says: it bumps the playcount of a track in iTunes by 1 and sets the Last Played date to the current date and time. It’s been helpful to me because many of my smart playlists rely on knowing if I’ve heard a track or not, but unfortunately sometimes my iPod doesn’t sync playcounts—and sometimes my iTunes library gets blown away, losing all playcount information.

To use the script, unzip it, drop the script in your Library/iTunes/Scripts folder, go to iTunes, select one or more tracks, then select Increment Playcount from the scripts menu.

More detail about this and my other AppleScripts on my Software page.

massDeleteManila: AppleScript for mass spam deletion

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 05:08:09 GMT

After the carpal tunnel moment earlier today, I decided to look on the bright side of spam. I updated my hoary old ManilaHandler AppleScript to add support for the Manila.message.delete method (and at the same time bundled the support script SOAPXMLRPCHandler into the body of the script). And I wrote a simple AppleScript, massDeleteManila, that takes a comma delimited list of message IDs and deletes them.

The UI isn’t elegant. You need to type or paste a comma delimited list into a dialog box. Plus no progress bar. But it works, and it is a lot faster than deleting spam through the web UI.

My suggested workflow for using this on your own Manila blog:

Copy and paste the table for your discussion group topic listing page showing the spam messages into Excel.
Copy just the message IDs and paste them into BBEdit (or another word processor).
Search and replace: replace paragraphs with commas.
Run the massDeleteManila script and paste the comma-delimited list of message IDs into the first dialog box.
If you haven’t filled out your blog URL yet, type it in, along with your username and password.
The script runs silently until all the messages have been deleted.

The massDeleteManila script is available for download. I provide it so that other Manila users, such as the Berkman bloggers, can benefit. Please use it carefully—there’s no easy way to undelete messages in Manila, and I cannot provide support if you accidentally delete important content. Note that you may need Tiger to run the script—I haven’t been able to test it under Panther.

In defense of plain ol’ SQL

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 18:37:30 GMT

Philip Greenspun Weblog: How long is the average Internet discussion forum posting?. I’m less interested in Philip’s answer than I am in the methodology: simple SQL select statements that give you very important product design data.

People talk about “data mining” and “business intelligence” as though they’re complicated, new skill sets, but really all you need sometimes to make the right call is a simple SQL query. And the right data set, of course…

Integrating Google Maps

Tim Jarrett — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 00:06:36 GMT

Mac OS X Hints: Map Address Book addresses via Google Maps. This is the sort of low tech URL-based hack that is perfect for AppleScript, and very easy to debug.

An older Mac OS X Hints article discusses the plug-in capability and provides another sample script. From that, it looks like you capture the field to which you’re adding the contextual menu using an “on action property” handler; the title can be set with “on action title”; and the actual code is in the “on perform action” block.

Other address book plug-ins:

iCal Scripts (Apple): schedule a call, create a “birthday event” (reminder), or create an event associated with the person
Dates and SMS Scripts (Daniel Browne): send an SMS message via a Bluetooth phone, email, or AIM
Skype call (bertlmike): open a Skype call

The plug-ins can also be written in Cocoa or Carbon.

Hmm…

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 03:25:56 GMT

First Panther note: some of my scripts don’t seem to work under Mac OS X 10.3. Specifically, Look Up Current Track in iTunes doesn’t work and iTunes2Manila fails because it can’t connect to the Internet. Wonder if Apple changed how SOAP calls work…

Update: Changed or more precisely broke, it looks like, based on evidence from this MacScripter thread. Stay tuned...

Fetching blog updates from Weblogs.com using Applescript

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 08 Aug 2003 04:55:11 GMT

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’m running an AppleScript once an hour to download data from Weblogs.com. For anyone who may be interested in seeing how it’s done, the code is below and is easily adaptable to other scripting languages, including DOS Batch (I know, I’ve done it). This is first pass code, not optimized, warts and all. Enjoy.

copy getWeblogsChanges() to {success, theFile}
if not success then
	display dialog "Could not get the changes file from Weblogs.com."	
return

end if
processWeblogsChanges(theFile)
on getWeblogsChanges()
	set changesSource to "http://www.weblogs.com/changes.xml"
	set theDate to current date
		set theYear to year of theDate as string
	set theMonth to month of theDate as string
	set theDay to day of theDate as string
	set theTime to time of theDate as string
		-- need to prompt for the user's directory instead
	set theFileName to "~/" & theYear & theMonth & theDay & theTime & "_changes.xml"
		set theShellCommand to "curl " & changesSource & " > " & theFileName
		--need error handling
	do shell script theShellCommand
	return {true, theFileName}
end getWeblogsChanges
on processWeblogsChanges(theFile)
	set theShellCommand to "gzip -c " & theFile & " >>changesxml.gz"
	do shell script theShellCommand
end processWeblogsChanges

Better weblogs.com usage data?

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 06 Aug 2003 02:05:36 GMT

I noted that I had let a new high water mark go by last week; the weblogs.com data watch has been updated and you can download the new data set here. The new high water mark is amazing, too: out of nowhere, it jumped from under 3000 to above 4000 weblogs in a three-hour period. Anyone know what was happening on Friday to drive that much traffic???

Anyway, this was the kick in the butt I needed to look at my cron script that I set up to download the Weblogs.com changes file. I had set cron to run a custom AppleScript (source to be shared shortly) to download changes.xml every two hours and gzip it, or so I thought. Looking at it today, the first day I left the machine on overnight since adding the cron setting, I realized I had asked it to download the file once a minute during the 2 am hour instead. Oops. Sorry about the bandwidth, Userland.

So why is this important? As I’ve been saying for a bit, I want to understand the dynamics of a day and a week in terms of blog posting frequency. Which are the high traffic days? What percentage of blog users post more than once a day? More than once every few days? Just how many unique blogs ping Weblogs.com in a two week period?

Starting today, I’ll be working on finding out. My cron script is now working (it’s amazing the difference between * 2 * * and * /2 * *). My machine won’t be sleeping or shut down for the next two weeks. I’ll make my summary data available at the end of the experiment and see if I can draw some conclusions about the meaning of the high water marks we’ve been seeing. Hopefully, if I’m successful with the project, this can be a longer term study. But for that to be true, I’ll have to automate the process of importing the data file and aggregating the statistics, and that may be too much to get done right now.

Is anyone else engaging with the changes data in this way? Are there any questions about the weblog population that two weeks of granular update data would provide?

Working with AmazonHandler

Tim Jarrett — Sat, 28 Jun 2003 21:53:04 GMT

As I promised a few weeks ago, I’ve spent a little more time working on AmazonHandler. The biggest problems people have had with it are that

it requires a supporting script which has to be loaded from a fixed location on your hard disk, and
there wasn’t an example of how to parse the output.

Number one is fairly trivial: you can either put the supporting script, SOAPXMLRPCHandler.scpt, in the standard location, which is in the computer’s /Library/Scripts directory—the one for all users, not your local version, though it should probably check both—or you can edit the InitSOAP subroutine to tell it to look for the script elsewhere.

Number two is harder, and I spent some time working through it last night. The trick is in knowing that various parts of the return have to be explicitly transformed either to lists or records before their parameters can be read. Once you do that, it’s fairly simple to parse the output.

I’ve hacked a quick demo script that is actually somewhat useful. Until I work out all the bugs, it will be available as a separate download; after that, I’ll probably bundle it with AmazonHandler. The script, Look Up Current Track in Amazon, talks to iTunes to get information about the currently playing track, then looks up the track’s album (or artist, if no album title is available) at Amazon, tells you what Amazon’s current price is, and offers you the option to go to Amazon’s page for the product should you wish to consider the option of purchasing it. So (buzzword version) this script integrates iTunes and Amazon using SOAP-based web services.

The script is available for download on my Scripts page.

AmazonHandler acting up

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 11 Jun 2003 14:34:24 GMT

I’ve had no less than four people contact me within the last few weeks to tell me that AmazonHandler, my AppleScript glue to allow calling the Amazon Web Services API, isn’t working for them. The most common error is "Can't make 'http://soap.amazon.com/onca/soap' into a record" but others have been reported as well, including problems with finding and loading the support scripts to do SOAP.

I think the first problem is caused by some code I put into SOAPXMLRPCHandler to work around a bug Apple introduced in the underlying SOAP layer sometime in the late 10.1.x/10.2 timeframe. The support script problem is tricky. The point of scripts is that they’re supposed to be quick and easy, so making the user install support scripts seems dumb. But it’s quicker and easier for me to release scripts that use common technologies (including the Manila API and SOAP generally) if I keep the scripts separate.

I promise I’m looking at it, if only because having this script would allow me to automate some of the workflow around “Current Listening” and “Current Reading.” But be patient—I have a day job, after all.

Eating one’s own dogfood—with the customer

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 24 Feb 2003 18:31:29 GMT

Dave continues to explore the joys of getting Userland’s flagship workgroup blogging solution, Manila, up and functional at Harvard. Today’s story captures him learning about a potential conflict between Frontier’s built-in web server and Microsoft IIS, if both are running on the same box.

This is exactly the sort of thing that more software developers, and CEOs, should do—get out into the wild, outside the company IT environment, on the other coast or in another part of the world, and try to install and operate your product. Does it work like you expected? Uh oh, it doesn’t! Have you documented the problem? Is it a bug or a compatibility issue? Has anyone else had the same problem? Is your website any help? Kudos to Dave for using his new job as a way to improve Userland’s products and support.

MT Trackback: this is the problem...

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 22:44:45 GMT

... with being a part-time hobbyist developer. I’d love to implement trackback pinging in Manila Envelope, but I really, really don’t have the time right now.

Updates: iTunes2Manila, ManilaHandler, SOAPXMLRPCHandler

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 08 Oct 2002 20:19:11 GMT

All the scripts in the subject line have been updated for Jaguar capability. You can download them here. For details on what changed, read this.

As you can probably tell...

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 08 Oct 2002 19:43:49 GMT

...I got iTunes2Manila working again. The problems appear to be rooted in changes to Apple’s implementation of XML-RPC and SOAP in Jaguar:

Passing HTML tags such as italics and anchor tags in text that is a parameter to an XML-RPC or SOAP call causes an error. You can deal with this by escaping the opening bracket as &lt and a semicolon...
AppleScript now passes all text parameters as Unicode by default. This might be a good thing in most places, but Manila’s RPC handler wants plain text and posts a message with an empty body if it’s passed Unicode. The fix is to coerce the text variable to plain text: set s to (s as record)'s «class ktxt»

I am testing my other scripts with these fixes (which reach into the supporting library scripts ManilaHandler and SOAPXMLRPCHandler) and will post fixes soon.

Not yet playing

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 08 Oct 2002 17:51:20 GMT

Sigh. Not yet. I just tried my modification of the iTunes2Manila script that encodes the HTML tags as entities. No joy...still posts an empty message body. Time for some serious debugging.

Good news for my scripts

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 04 Oct 2002 22:42:28 GMT

Apologies for not blogging sooner. Between slow network connectivity here and the generally fragile state of editthispage.com, I’ve been unable to get to my site all day.

I had some insights on the problems with my scripts on the flight back. By reviewing the Apple-published scripting list archives, I realized that others were having problems publishing via XML-RPC (and probably SOAP) any text that contained unescaped HTML tags (e.g. < instead of &lt). This explains why my iTunes2Manila script was publishing with an empty body and should be easy to fix. There were also suggestions that processing the arguments to an XML-RPC or SOAP call to use plaintext instead of Unicode (or vice versa) would result in successful RPC calls. I may have some head down time on that shortly and hope to be able to bring my scripts up to Jaguar compatibility soon.

Teething pains

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 19 Sep 2002 18:57:19 GMT

Dave asks folks to try out a revised Radio aggregator that uses the guid attribute in RSS 2.0. Problem: After installing it, it actually re-lists every item in the person's RSS file each time you scan, regardless of if you've already seen and deleted the item or not.

iCal Scriptapalooza

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 19 Sep 2002 16:36:55 GMT

There are a ton of people writing iCal scripts. The coolest so far is this announcement on Studio Log: Have Quicktime Player Read Your Schedule for Today. I can't look at the script on my work machine, but I would guess it grabs the text from iCal and runs it through text-to-speech and outputs it to Quicktime Player.

I hope Craig has seen this...

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 12 Sep 2002 22:27:40 GMT

When I was a programmer we would have killed for something like this. There are a ton of business benefits too. It's really hard to get all the stakeholders in a system design case to sit in the same room for three weeks to come up with the right structure for a data model. This collaborative ER tool provides people with a way to discuss ideas (albeit at a very limited level) from their own computers and collaborate in realtime on the design.

What this isn't is a sufficient solution. In these sorts of scenarios, especially when building the first-pass data model for a system, you will spend the first week or more just arguing over the right entities and the implications that that has on the software that you're building. So bundling this with voice collaboration, IM, and certainly a way to save and retrieve your work, might make this a pretty darn compelling product--or add-on to a development environment.

Making progress...but not on company time

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 28 Aug 2002 18:40:23 GMT

I narrowed the problem with iTunes2Manila down last night. It's got to be in the code that handles creating and posting the news item to Manila; the sister script (iTunes2TextEdit) works fine putting the same information into a TextEdit document, so the disappearance of the track information must be happening somewhere else.

I haven't made much progress on my apps recently, largely because:

I'm employed and doing anything with them on company time would be crazy stupid
We are still catching up with the house--the garden and general house improvements and unpacking continue to take a lot of time
My wife works east coast hours and I need to maximize the time that I can have with her, meaning after dinner programming is a no-no
I finally got the Diablo II Expansion Set working (I had had a damaged Diablo II install disc, which prevented me from installing the expansion set), and I'm addicted again.

I think I'm going to have to schedule my late nights. Programming Monday, Diablo Tuesday, unpacking Wednesday...

Long day

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 28 Aug 2002 05:26:21 GMT

I was at an all day company meeting and couldn’t update the blog. Priority tonight: why doesn’t iTunes2Manila work???

NY Times on Radio

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 20 Mar 2002 17:11:35 GMT

The latest from Userland... full New York Times headlines in Radio UserLand. Having previously subscribed to Times feeds from NewsIsFree, I can only guess at the technical differences. Dave has been talking for days now about new drivers to allow Radio's news page to pick up non-RSS XML-based news sources. My guess is Dave made an agreement with the Times to allow Userland to syndicate an existing XML format there and gave Radio the ability to read it. I think (but am not sure) that this is different from the way NewsIsFree works.

From a qualitative perspective? NewsIsFree's feeds don't include bylines; their opinion feed doesn't include letters to the editor. Their feeds appear to be more selective and differently formatted.

Is Dave competing with NewsIsFree? Not in the professional market; their response to my story about syndication makes that pretty clear. But what is he doing? Userland's not about content, it's about providing pipes for content. The New York Times feeds appear to be the demo for this new Radio capability.

Scripting OPML for OmniOutliner

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 15 Mar 2002 19:24:34 GMT

I got tired of complaining about OmniOutliner not having OPML capability, so I hacked a quick AppleScript to make it happen. It's very beta right now, but it works for outlines that aren't too deep. Currently it's choking on my outline for the sitePref documentation, so I'm trying to go back and figure out why. You can download OmniOutliner2OPML from my scripts page.

Someone made a derivative work from MY script!!!

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 13 Mar 2002 03:31:36 GMT

Saw this via mac.scripting.com: Will Wade has released a new AppleScript based on my iTunes2Blog that posts the currently playing iTunes track to Blogger. I'm flattered and happy that my early script was helpful to someone. Interestingly, I don't seem to be able to find Will's blog anywhere, or I'd point to it...

Problem with manila.siteprefs.get

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 28 Feb 2002 19:48:14 GMT

Another issue with sitePrefs.get: the format in which the results for news item departments are created can return malformed XML if the department name contains a space.

Unfortunately, this will cause a delay in the next release of Manila Envelope until I either figure out how to work around it or work with UserLand to get it fixed.

More Manila stuff: sitePref.set funkiness

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 27 Feb 2002 21:01:20 GMT

So I'm having problems setting site prefs from my application. I was going to add a quick feature to allow managing editors to change the tagline of their site from within Manila Envelope, but I can't get sitePref.set to work--it either complains about something not being a valid address or responds "true" without doing anything. I've put a detailed description on the XMLRPC discussion site.

Don't know how I missed this: permalinks in Manila

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 25 Feb 2002 05:16:41 GMT

Frontier News: New Manila feature: permanent links for News Items. I always wondered how I could get people linking to a particular item on my page. Now it's under the # symbol after each item. Thanks, guys.

Oliver's Cross-Posting Manila Plug-In

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 22 Feb 2002 15:41:07 GMT

Check this out: Oliver's crossPost Plug-In. "This simple Plug-In installs XML-RPC handlers to post news items to a Manila site and retrieve a department list of that site." My question: how does this compare to calling newsItem.create in the standard Manila API?

A note about department names

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 20 Feb 2002 21:49:39 GMT

I'm still working on the issue, but it looks like if you name your News Item departments with spaces in them that you can get errors from AppleScript when parsing the resulting XML output from sitePrefs.get ("newsitem.departments"). I don't know whether AppleScript isn't parsing the XML correctly, or whether Manila is outputing malformed XML, but consider this a word to the wise.

On the importance of modeling Manila

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 07 Feb 2002 16:22:44 GMT

I did the preceding UML (Unified Modeling Language) sequence diagram with a little tool called ObjectPlant. It's a shareware UML tool that just became my new best friend. There are times when you have to stop and draw what you're doing in a project, even a moderately complex project like this one. I'll be posting some more pictures like the one below as my version of the "Busy Developer's Guide to ManilaRPC" that Daniel put together.

Blogger, Radio, and Manila Envelope

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 24 Jan 2002 01:44:46 GMT

Dave's helping me make magic: The Blogger API in Radio. What does this mean? Well, for starters, once Manila Envelope supports the Blogger API (soon!) it will be able to post to your local Radio site. Lots of people are using Radio and other Blogger enabled tools... The power of a simple interface appears again.

It's not work, just fun

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 16 Jan 2002 18:30:07 GMT

I'm playing around a bit more with Radio UserLand. It's going to take some patience to make it work, as I really want to get it to point at this site and not at my Radio Weblog. Meanwhile I've decided how to move forward on Manila Envelope, which was felled right before launch with an impossible problem with the preferences. I'm going to have to write my own code to write and read an XML preference file. Should be fun. Dig we must...

Unexpected snag

Tim Jarrett — Sat, 05 Jan 2002 16:42:45 GMT

I'm going to have to delay the release of Manila Envelope. When I used it yesterday morning it was working, and now the preferences have broken. This, I guess, is a danger of using someone else's code without fully understanding it. I'll have to do some digging through Cocoa to figure out what's going on.

In the meantime, I'm hitting the road after a great night's sleep at my in-laws in New Jersey. Next post will be from Washington, DC.

Thanks and keep the feedback coming

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 16:17:45 GMT

I kind of paused this morning after I wrote the last entry. I'm surprised looking back at it that I'm still working on these scripts. I mentioned the first script I was going to write in July, half joking, in an email to Dave when Apple announced they were going to be baking in SOAP support in 10.1. I wrote the script when I got 10.1 more as a proof of concept than anything else. It works reasonably well. Why am I going forward?

Well, I never had the time to learn all the stuff I wanted to know to program in Cocoa, for one thing, and this is a quick way to learn Interface Builder and some of the other tools in the free Dev Tools IDE. There have been other features that I've wanted to add to my existing scripts--it bugs me, for instance, that you type your password in plain text in a dialog box, and that there's no interface for clearing your stored information.

But mainly I've had feedback from a number of people who have convinced me that this stuff is worth investing time in. One, the server guy at a major state university, wanted help in getting his faculty to use the web for knowledge management. (I still haven't added his feature. Soon, hopefully.) A few scripters have thanked me for the effort I had put in because they use the tool every day.

It's great to know people are out there reading and blogging. If you find my tools useful and you have suggestions for how to improve them, or just want to drop me a line, please do. My mailbox is open, and as soon as this last paper's done I'm going back to do some more scripting.

AppleScript Studio vs. old AppleScript, take 1

Tim Jarrett — Sun, 16 Dec 2001 19:03:55 GMT

I'm digging deeper into AppleScript studio this morning. It's really starting to blow my mind. The basic concept is simple: take the power of Cocoa applications, object oriented applications that can tap all the built in frameworks to add lots of power to your application, and build an application on top of them -- specifying the actions to be executed using the English like syntax of AppleScript. This is so much more powerful than just providing GUI for AppleScript. It's like getting PowerBuilder, my old programming language, dropped into my lap all over again.

I'm going through the tutorial now and am noting differences between "old-school" AppleScript under Mac OS X and the new AppleScript Studio. Some starters:

You write AppleScript Studio applications in Project Builder and do the user interface in Interface Builder. This gives you access to a lot of features, like...
...a built in debugger!
It looks like it's now up to the developer to make source for AppleScript Studio applications available as a separate file. Under old AppleScript, you could distribute an AppleScript "application" that was doubleclickable but could also be opened by Script Editor if the recipient wanted to see how you did something.
A small point: the "display dialog" command now creates a window that has a proper title bar.

Over the next few days I'll be going through this stuff in more detail (while I'm writing my last paper of the semester) and will post my findings.

Good software makes up for a lot

Tim Jarrett — Sat, 15 Dec 2001 00:43:58 GMT

E-Lab is done, except for our final presentation to the company we consulted to. Kickin' back with some software. The new developer tools are out, and I'm a playin'.

AppleScript Studio. I love it. Mac OS X, an IDE free in every box (or at least downloadable). From the documentation distributed with the dev tools:

AppleScript Studio combines an application framework with a development environment, allowing you to provide sophisticated user interfaces for applications that execute AppleScript scripts. AppleScript Studio comprises features from AppleScript, Project Builder, Interface Builder, and the Cocoa application framework. With AppleScript Studio, you can quickly create native Mac OS X applications that support the Aqua user interface.
AppleScript Studio requires Mac OS X version 10.1.2, or the December 2001 Developer Tools CD.

Script update

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 12 Dec 2001 20:06:59 GMT

New script update today. I made a minor change to one of my supporting scripts, SOAPXMLRPCHandler, that should improve the ability of scripts calling it to return successfully when talking to slow websites. If you are using any of my *2Manila or *2Blog scripts, you'll want to download this performance fix.

Oops

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 10 Dec 2001 14:33:36 GMT

Sorry for the multiple postings. I've got to make some adjustments to my script--it keeps reporting timeouts when it's actually completed sending the message.

Oops

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 19 Nov 2001 15:51:22 GMT

Interesting issue. When I paste text from an email, it comes in with line breaks -- which are ignored in the HTML and end up running words together. Got to do something about that--maybe a new scripting challenge. After I finish my exam today, of course.

Fixing my bugs

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 16 Nov 2001 18:34:08 GMT

Version 1.0.1 of iTunes2Manila is now available from the Scripts page. This fixes some problems with text formatting when tracks without artists or albums are playing.

Lucky

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 16 Nov 2001 18:20:16 GMT

So as evidenced by the previous news item, I'm pretty lucky as a programmer. I hadn't bothered testing iTunes2Manila with a streaming audio source as the current item before, and I wasn't sure it would work. Not sure why it doesn't have a closing quotation mark, but at least the script doesn't crash.

New scripts--full circle

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 15 Nov 2001 18:52:26 GMT

There's a new script on my scripts page. I used it to write this news item. It posts the current text from TextEdit as a News Item. It's called TextEdit2ManilaNews. Enjoy.

Also, there have been updates to my first script, TextEdit2Blog, and to ManilaHandler. Performance improvements in TextEdit2Blog, and made it dependent on ManilaHandler. And some bug fixes in ManilaHandler. Big scripting day.

Scripting Manila and iTunes

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 20:00:49 GMT

New scripts today. First, a version of the iTunes script I wrote a few days ago that posts the currently playing item directly to a Manila website as a news item. Second, some modules that contain functions for making SOAP calls and calling Manila RPC interfaces.

As a programmer, I was big into reuse of code through object orientation. It bugged me for a long time that I couldn't figure out how to make that work in AppleScript. Today I've got one version working. It's not very clean, because it requires a lot of drag and drop installation, but it's getting there. The other good thing is that it will cut down on the amount of pain in writing and deploying these scripts because it separates a lot of the Manila "glue" code from the parts of the scripts that actually do things.

All the scripts can be downloaded from my scripts page.

One note about iTunes2Manila--if your site is hosted on editthispage.com like mine is, you may get some timeout messages. I'm still playing with avoiding these, but (as you can tell from my home page), just because you get a timeout doesn't mean that the news item didn't get posted.

Sorry for all the noise

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 19:43:59 GMT

I'll have some news shortly about why my MP3 playlist is showing up on my homepage. For now, just think of it as my way of distracting myself from more serious work.