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AppleScript Utilities and Applications

Apple provides a number of utilities and applications in Mac OS X to enhance the features of AppleScript and your scripts. You can get additional information on some items described in this section by searching in Mac Help in the Finder or by going to the AppleScript website.

Contents:

AppleScript Utility
Folder Actions Setup
System Events and GUI Scripting
Image Events
Database Events


AppleScript Utility

AppleScript Utility, located in /Applications/AppleScript, is an application that first became available in Mac OS X version 10.4. Starting in Mac OS X version 10.5, this utility is itself scriptable.

AppleScript Utility helps you manage several AppleScript-related features in Mac OS X that were formerly available separately. For example, AppleScript Utility provides an interface to:

Folder Actions Setup

Folder Actions is a feature that lets you associate scripts with folders. A script is executed when the folder to which it is attached is opened or closed, moved or resized, or has items added or removed.

Folder Actions Setup, located in /Applications/AppleScript, is an application that first became available in Mac OS X version 10.3. Starting in Mac OS X version 10.5, Folder Actions Setup is itself scriptable.

This utility helps you perform tasks related to Folder Actions, including the following:

System Events and GUI Scripting

System Events is an agent (or faceless background application) that supplies the terminology for using a number of features in AppleScript scripts. Among these features is GUI scripting, which allows your scripts to perform some actions in applications that have no built-in scripting support. System Events, which is located in /System/Library/CoreServices, has been part of Mac OS X since version 10.1 (Puma), though its features have evolved since that release.

The following are some of the terminology suites supplied by System Events in Mac OS X version 10.4 (and where noted, in version 10.5). For more information, display the application dictionary, as described in “Displaying Scripting Dictionaries.” You can also get information on many of the features supported by System Events in Mac Help (from the Help menu in Mac OS X) and at the AppleScript GUI Scripting web page at the AppleScript in Mac OS X website.

Image Events

Like System Events, Image Events is an agent (or faceless background application) that is located in /System/Library/CoreServices. Image Events supports the manipulation, from scripts, of images and image-related data through operations such as cropping, embedding, matching, padding, profiling, rotating, and scaling. These operations are typically used in print, web, and media publishing.

Image Events has been part of Mac OS X since version 10.4 and provides access to the built-in service called SIPS (Scriptable Image Processing Server) that became available in that OS release.

You can find more information on Image Events in Mac Help (from the Mac OS X Help menu) or at the Image Events web page. You can also examine the Image Events dictionary with Script Editor, as described in “Displaying Scripting Dictionaries.” SIPS is described in Technical Note TN2035 ColorSync on Mac OS X. You can also get some information about SIPS by typing sips --help in a Terminal window.

Database Events

Database Events is a simple, scratchpad database implementation for use in AppleScript scripts. It allows any script applet to create and edit its own database.

You can use Database Events to create a new database with a file associated with it or to open a database file to access its database. Databases contain records, records contain fields, and fields contain a name and a value. The assignment of names and values is free form, as the scripter defines it. Databases persist in the file system, across executions of Database Events.

Database Events has been part of Mac OS X since version 10.4. Like System Events, Database Events is an agent (or faceless background application) that is located in /System/Library/CoreServices.

You can examine the Database Events dictionary with Script Editor, as described in “Displaying Scripting Dictionaries.”



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© 2002, 2007 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved. (Last updated: 2007-10-31)


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