AppleScript has been around for nearly 20 years, and although in that time it has doubtless succeeded in inviting many non-programmers to try their hands at writing scripts to automate applications, ...

Before you can build your first AppleScript you need to know some basics: what a script-able application is and how to use the Script Editor. Script-able Applications Basically, script-able ...

Mac power users love to play with scripting and automation. If there's something that's repetitive that needs to be done, it's a lot easier just to either use Automator to automate the process or ...

I had a moment of self-doubt the other morning: am I man or automaton? The question came up when I fired up my office computer and started manually launching one set of programs and changing the ...

This article is excerpted from The Mac OS X Tiger Book from Wiley Publishing (0-7645-7956-6); the book can be ordered from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. Copyright ...

Mac OS offers AppleScript as a powerful automation tool you can use to share data among applications and turn complex file-management tasks into single-click programs. First implemented in 1992, when ...

If you edit HTML code on your Mac, you might find that Apple's text-handling programs like TextEdit may not suffice, especially since as a basic text editor it does not provide syntax-aware coloring, ...

If you daily send a lot of links to your friends / Twitter followers it’s very likely that you’ve started using a URL shortener. It’s fast, easy and so web 2.0 to send a shortened URL, you can’t deny ...

One cool thing you can do in the Finder is set any window to view as large, 512X512 icons. You can do this by clicking on the icon button in the top left of any Finder window, then dragging the ...

We’ve written before at ProfHacker about the power of scripting tasks: Letting your computer take over some of the repetitive things that each of us do regularly daily hourly. Recently, for example, ...

Christmas is coming, and instead of writing out holiday cards by hand, wouldn’t it be easier to just e-mail them to all your friends and loved ones? But e-mail can be so impersonal, at least without ...

If you're confused by AppleScript, wish you could use something else to make OS X applications jump through hoops, or just aren't a fan of it for whatever reason (and I can think of a few), don't ...