1.1. The Script Menu To get your first taste of AppleScript, double-click Install Script Menu. When you do so, a curled-parchment icon appears right in your menu bar. (This icon is a recurring theme in Mac OS X that means, roughly, "What you're looking at has something to do with AppleScript.") Simply click the menu bar icon once to display the Script Menu (Figure 1-1).  | All the scripts that appear in the Script Menu come from the Library Scripts folder. And, as described on Section 1.1.16.1, that means you can add your own scripts to the Script Menu in addition to tweaking the existing ones. |
|
You can run any script just by selecting its name from the appropriate submenu. The following sections provide a breakdown of what the scripts do. 1.1.1. Address Book Scripts Here, you'll find a single Import Addresses script, designed to move your contacts into Mac OS X's Address Book from other applications, such as Entourage, Outlook Express, Palm Desktop, Eudora, Claris Emailer, and Netscape. If you've got a lot of friends, this script saves you from having to re-enter all their names, phone numbers, and email addresses by hand. | The scripts in the Helper Scripts submenu (just above Import Addresses) are off-limits to mere mortals. If you try to run any of the Helper Scripts, Mac OS X simply tells you to use the Import Addresses script instead. |
|
 | Figure 1-2. The Script Menu is your key to running AppleScripts from just about any program. However, if you're using a program with a lot of menus (Word or Photoshop, for example), that program may clip off the Script Menu. To move the Script Menu to a less clip-prone position, simply  -drag its icon farther to the right. |
|
1.1.2. Basics In this submenu, you'll find three small, handy scripts: | To see a more orderly list of such files in Help Viewerorganized by Apple for quick referencechoose Library AppleScript Help and then click Browse AppleScript Help. |
|
AppleScript Website opens the AppleScript home page (www.apple.com/applescript/) in your default Web browser. Open Script Editor launches the Script Editor program from your Applications AppleScript folder. See Chapter 2 for more on this powerful program.
1.1.3. ColorSync This submenu contains almost 20 different scripts for working with ColorSync (a technology for matching colors between pictures, computer screens, printers, and so on). When you select a script from this submenu, it presents a short dialog box explaining what it does. Here are some of the highlights: Build profile info web page presents an Open dialog box for picking a folder of pictures. Once you've done so, the script generates a Web page containing each image, along with a description of which profile (color settings) it uses.
| Even if you don't use ColorSync, this script can be quite handy; it's a great way to quickly generate a Web page from the pictures in a folder. |
|
Mimic PC monitor adjusts your screen so the color settings are similar to those of a Windows PC. (This script is especially useful if you're a Web designer, since it shows you how your Web pages will likely look to Windows users all over the world.) Remove profile from image takes any special color settings out of a picture, so you're left with the raw, unfiltered colors that were there to begin with. If you're trying to gauge the accuracy of your digital camera's color settings, this script is a helpful tool.
| To learn more about ColorSync, visit www.apple.com/colorsync/. |
|
1.1.4. Finder Scripts This submenu contains a bunch of timesaving scripts for working with files in the Finder: AboutFinder Scripts simply presents a dialog box explaining how the scripts work. Add to File/Folder Names lets you tack the same prefix or suffix onto every item in the active Finder window (Figure 1-2).
| If there aren't any Finder windows open, this script (and all the other Finder scripts) works with the files or folders on your desktop instead. That means, for example, that the Add to File Names script appends your chosen extension to every file on the desktop if there aren't any Finder windows open. |
|
Change Case of Item Names lets you make every file and folder in the current Finder window either all uppercase or all lowercase. If you pine for the days of DOSwhere every file name was in capital lettersthis script is for you. Finder Windows - Hide All minimizes all your Finder windows, one at a time, to the Dock.
| A faster way to minimize all your Finder windows is to simply Option-click the yellow minimize button in any single Finder window. That way, the windows all minimize simultaneously, rather than one at a time. |
|
 | Figure 1-3. If you have a lot of files that you're bringing over from Mac OS 9 or your digital camera, there's a good chance that they're missing file extensions (abbreviations like .jpeg and .txt that let them open in Mac OS X). The hard way to add these extensions is to rename each file by hand (top). The easy way: in the Script Menu, choose Finder Scripts Add to File Names, enter the file extension you want to append, and click Suffix (bottom). |
|
Finder Windows - Show All brings back all your Finder windows from the Dock. Replace Text in Item Names does a find-and-replace on every file name, folder name, or both in your active Finder window (Figure 1-3). Switch to Finder brings the Finder to the front and hides every other program.
| You can accomplish the same task by Option--clicking the Finder icon in the Dock. |
|
 | Figure 1-4. Batch-renaming items is a four-step process. Top: Choose whether you want to apply the operation to files, folders, or both. Second from top: Enter the text you want to replace (it's not case-sensitive). Second from bottom: Enter the text you want to substitute. Bottom: Confirm your choice and watch in amazement as AppleScript renames all the files that match your text. |
|
1.1.5. Folder Actions These scripts turn on and off folder actionsscripts that run automatically in the Findereither for the entire system or just for a specific folder. (Folder action coverage begins on Chapter 11.) 1.1.6. FontSync Scripts If you spend your life doing visual layout or printing, you may have come across FontSync profiles (little summaries of all the fonts on someone's computer). You can easily generate such profiles (using Create FontSync Profile) or compare your own profile to someone else's (using Match FontSync Profile) to see if you have the same fonts. Beyond that, though, there's not much you can do with the AppleScripts found in this submenu. 1.1.7. Info Scripts The two scripts in this submenu are pretty much duplicates of existing Mac OS X features: Current Date & Time displays a dialog box withyou guessed itthe current date and time. The only real benefit to this command is that it has a Clipboard button; when you click that, the date and time information is copied to the Clipboard, so you can paste (-V) that information into a document window, such as one from TextEdit, Mail, or Microsoft Word. Font Sampler displays every font you have on your computer in its own typeface (Figure 1-4). Of course, you can always preview your fonts with Font Book (found in your Applications folder), but that's not nearly as fun as being able to see how all your fonts look at once.
 | Figure 1-5. Each sentence here is supposed to contain every letter of the alphabet, so you can see exactly how each letter appears in each typeface. Of course, whoever programmed this feature forgot that the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" is missing the letter "s" (it should say "jumps" instead of "jumped"). |
|
1.1.8. Internet Scripts With the exception of the first script in this folder, these scripts go out and troll the Internet to fetch information for you: About Internet Services Scripts presents a dialog box with a link to additional Web services. (See Sidebar 9.6 for more about using AppleScript with Web services.) Current Temperature by Zipcode gives you the temperature outside your house in both Fahrenheit and Celsius, assuming you live in the United States. Stock Quote fetches a 20-minute delayed stock quote for the ticker symbol of your choice.
| If you don't know a company's ticker symbol, visit http://finance.yahoo.com/ to look it up. But if you want to quickly see how Apple's stock is performing, just click the OK button when the dialog box appears. (The script automatically inserts AAPL, Apple's ticker symbol, into the dialog box.) |
|
1.1.9. Mail Scripts This submenu contains a collection of scripts that work with Mac OS X's built-in Mail program (Section 9.4). | If you use a different email program, you're out of luck; these scripts work only with Mail. |
|
Count Messages in All Mailboxes is a convenient way to tell how much spam you've been getting. Of course, that's not what this script is meant forit's just supposed to tell you how much email you have in each mailbox. If you're like most people, though, your spam count will far outweigh anything else you have in your mailboxes, rendering this count almost useless. Crazy Message Text is a great way to send electronic greeting cards, birthday wishes, or ransom notes (Figure 1-5).
 | Figure 1-6. Top: Enter your text in the Crazy Message Text dialog box. You can customize the range of font sizes in the message by clicking Set Prefs. Bottom: Once you click Continue, you end up with a randomly formatted jumble of text, perfect for avoiding handwriting detection. |
|
Create LDAP Server is worthless unless you're on a corporate network. If you are, though, you may have access to an LDAP server (basically, a virtual employee directory). Your network administrator can help you fill out the dialog boxes. Once you've set up an LDAP server in Mail, you'll be able to type the first few letters of an employee's email address and have the rest of the address filled in for you automatically. (Of course, it might not be worth all that trouble to configure an LDAP server if you've already got all your contacts in Address Book.) Create New Mail Account prompts you for everything you need to set up a new email account. There's not much benefit to this multi-dialog box script, however, when you can set up a new account all at once in Mail Preferences Accounts. Create New Message takes you, dialog box by dialog box, through everything you need to make a new email message. The only benefit of using this script (instead of creating a new message in Mail itself) is that you don't have to bring Mail to the front first. Display All Accounts and Preferences puts together a new email message containing every imaginable statistic about your email settings. This script even attaches a copy of Mail's preference files for your perusing pleasure. Get Size of IMAP Mailbox is perfect for figuring out how full your .Mac mailbox isif you've signed up for Apple's .Mac service, that is. Simply select an email account, let Mail synchronize its database with your mail server, and wait a few minutes. When Mail is done calculating, you'll see a new email message telling you how much space your email is taking up on the server. Import Addresses is identical to the Address Book version described on Section 1.1.1. In other words, this script lets you import your contacts from a third-party programlike Microsoft Entourageinto Mac OS X's Address Book. (Once you do so, all your old contacts will be available in Mail as well.)
| The Helper scripts aren't much help here either. Just like in the Address Book scripts, you can't run these Helper scripts yourself. |
|
Manage SMTP Servers lists all the outgoing email servers that Mail is set up to use but that you're not using to send mail. If you deleted an email account but forgot to delete all the server settings that went with it, for example, this script can help you track down the orphaned settings. Rule Actions lets you run AppleScripts whenever email that matches certain criteria arrives. Check out Help with Rule Actions for more information on using this powerful feature, or see Sidebar 9.4 for an example of rule actions in action.
All the AppleScripts found in the Scripts Menu submenu only work from within Mail: just select an email message and choose the script you want to run. For more detailed explanations, check out Sidebar 1-3. 1.1.10. Navigation Scripts This subfolder contains scripts that let you jump to a particular folder in the Finder, right from the menu bar of any program. | If the folder you want to open doesn't have its own dedicated script, just choose from the extended folder listing in Open Special Folder. |
|
1.1.11. Printing Scripts Each of these scripts helps you send something to your printer: About "Convert"/"Print Window" Scripts provides some tips for using these scripts with multiple files at once. Convert to PDF/PostScript takes any graphics or plain text files you've selected in the Finder and converts them to either PDF or PostScript format. This is a great tool if your Mac is connected to a shared printer on your network, for example, but you don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars for a dedicated PostScript converter (a necessity for using many network printers). Instead, just use this PostScript-converting script and send the resulting file directly to your printer using Printer Setup Utility (in your Applications Utilities folder).
Frequently Asked Question
Multiple Script Menus | I see the regular Script Menu in the upper-right corner of my screen, but I also see one in the regular menu bar of some of my programs. What's the deal? You've just come across one of AppleScript's quirks. The global Script Menuthe one you see in the menu bar from all your programs, and the one that this chapter talks aboutis a fairly new development in the world of AppleScript. As far as old programs like AppleWorks and BBEdit are concerned, the global Script Menu might as well not exist. These programs have their own script menus and don't add their private scripts to the global Script Menu. 
Luckily, some programs are kind enough to put their scripts in program-specific script menus and also in the global Script Menu (Mac OS X-native programs like Mail and Address Book, for example, fall into this category). These programs give you the benefits of both approaches: you get a script menu that you can use when you're working within the programoften with keyboard shortcuts for useful scriptsbut you also get the global Script Menu with the same exact scripts, so you can run them from another program. Of course, there's a third categorythe one that just about every other program fits into. These programs (TextEdit, Microsoft Word, Photoshop, and iChat, just to name a few) lack script menus of their own. In these cases, any program-specific scripts you create must be placed into the global Script Menu, because the program has nowhere to store them in its own menu bar. |
Print Window is a handy replacement for the old Print Window command from Mac OS 9's Finder. This script lets you generate a printout of all the items inside any folder you choose (with no icons, alas), to post on your refrigerator perhaps.
| The Print Window with Subfolders script is the same, except that it prints a list of all the folders' subfolders as well. |
|
1.1.12. Script Editor Scripts This submenu is filled with dozens of helpful scripts for getting the most out of Script Editor. For a quick summary of what the scripts do, choose "About these scripts." Or, for a more detailed explanation of using these scripts while writing your own code, turn to Sidebar 2.3. 1.1.13. Sherlock Scripts OK, "scripts" is a bit of a misnomerthere's only one script here. Nonetheless, it's a useful one: Search Internet lets you enter any text and have Sherlock check the results from five search engines simultaneously. The results come back in an easy-to-browse list, ranked by how relevant each site is to your search terms. 1.1.14. UI Element Scripts The scripts in this menu are all demonstrations of AppleScript's GUI Scripting capability, for controlling programs' interfaces. These scripts probably won't make much sense to you, however, until you've read Chapter 12, which explains how GUI Scripting works. | You can't run any of these scripts right from the Script Menu; you have to run them from Script Editor (Section 2.1.1.3) instead. |
|
1.1.15. URLs This final set of scripts provides quick links to some Web sites. All of these scripts use your default Web browserwhich for most Mac OS X users is Safari, unless you specify a different browser (such as Camino, Firefox, or even Internet Explorer) in Safari Preferences General. | If you want a stock quote for any other company, choose Internet Scripts Stock Quote. Unfortunately, using that other script doesn't provide any of the detailed news, graphs, and statistics that Apple's own stock quote script does. |
|
Apple Store brings you straight to Apple's online retail shop, http://store.apple.com/. AppleScript Related Sites contains scripts for jumping to three of the most popular AppleScript sites on the Web. (See Section C.1 for more AppleScript-related Web sites.) CNN takes you right to the popular online news site. Download Weather Map fetches an up-to-the-minute weather map of the continental United States and saves it as weathermap.jpg on your desktop. The script then goes one step further and opens the file in your favorite image viewer (by default, the Preview program). Figure 1-6 has the details.
 | Figure 1-7. Unless you've specified a different program to open JPEG files in the Finder, your weather map opens in Preview (shown here). Of course, if you're not a meteorologist, this map may not be very helpful to you; if that's the case, check out Internet Scripts Current Temperature by Zipcode for a more digestible take on the weather outside. |
|
Macintouch brings you to the popular in-the-know Mac news site. MacWeek is a poor title for this script, as it actually takes you to MacCentral, a news site run by Macworld magazine.
1.1.16. Customizing the Script Menu At this point, you probably think the Script Menu is a pretty handy tool for running the scripts on your Mac. However, the Script Menu is much more than just a tool for launching the scripts that come with Mac OS X. Hidden behind its humble icon in the menu bar is enough power to keep any Mac person engrossed for hours. For example, you can: Add new scripts to the Script Menu. Or, if you're a clutter nut, you can remove some of the useless scripts that come with the menu. Rearrange the submenus. Since the Script Menu just mirrors a folder that lives on your system (found in Macintosh HD Library Scripts), you can move scripts around and customize the Script Menu to suit your needs. Tweak the scripts themselves. Fix Apple's spelling oversights (Figure 1-4), for instance, or insert AppleScript commands of your own into the built-in scripts.
1.1.16.1 Adding new scripts After you use the Script Menu for a while, you'll probably get bored with the selection of scripts that Apple ships along with Mac OS X. Luckily, you can take any script you wantfor example, an AppleScript you write yourself, or one you download from a Web site listed on Section C.1and add it to your Script Menu. Say you want a script that'll speak the time and temperature out loud. You can search online for an AppleScript that does just that, and once you download the script, you can add it to your Script Menu as follows: Download the script you want from the Internet. In this case, the script you want is available from http://files.macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/Utilities/SayYourTimeAndTemperature.sit. | If the downloaded file doesn't expand itself automatically, simply double-click its icon in the Finder. |
|
Open the Macintosh HD Library Scripts folder. This is the Library folder that's located at the root of your Mac's hard drive (not to be confused with your personal Library folder, described on Sidebar 1.2). Drag the script you just downloaded and drop it into any of the folders in the Finder window. Because this new script uses the Internet to access its information, an appropriate folder would be Internet Services. | You can put the script in whichever folder you want, and you can even name it whatever you want. For this script (originally named SayYourTimeAndTemperature), a more concise name might be Time and Temp, for example. (To rename a file, select it, press Return, type the new name, and press Return again.) |
|
Open the Script Menu and run your new script (Figure 1-7). The script opens Address Book in the background to find your home address and then "speaks" out loud the temperature and time for your area (using the default system voice you've chosen for your Mac via System Preferences Speech Default Voice).
1.1.16.2 Rearranging submenus It's nice that Apple took the time to organize the scripts in the Script Menu into different submenus, but sometimes it seems like their choices were just plain random. Why, for example, aren't the Finder scripts and Navigation scripts combined in the same folder when both sets of scripts work with the Finder?
Frequently Asked Question
The Mystery of Open Scripts Folder | Why is it that whenever I choose Open Scripts Folder from the Script Menu, the Finder shows me an empty window? I know that I have scriptsthey all show up in the Script Menubut I can't seem to get to them using the Open Scripts Folder command. This strange behavior is all Mac OS X's fault, mainly because there is more than one Scripts folder. All the built-in scripts (the ones you've been looking at in the Script Menu) are stored in Library Scripts, in the root level of your hard drive. On the other hand, when you choose Open Scripts Folder, the Finder goes to the Library Scripts folder found within your Home folder. Luckily, if you place or save scripts into your Home Library Scripts folder, they'll also appear in the Script Menu (below the ones from the Library Scripts folder). This gives you an opportunity to fix the behavior of the Open Scripts Folder command: just move all the existing scripts (from Library Scripts) into your Home Library Scripts folder. From now on, you'll see every script in the Script Menu, but when you choose Open Scripts Folder, you'll also see the correct scripts in the Finder. This workaround has one unfortunate side effect: if you move the scripts into your Home folder, none of the other people who use your computer will be able to access the scripts from their accounts. |
Luckily, you can override the Script Menu and put scripts into whatever folders you'd like. To move some scripts from one Script Menu category to another, simply open the Library Scripts folder, and drag the scripts into a different subfolder (Figure 1-8). | Your scripts don't have to be inside a subfolder at all; if you'd like, you can just leave them floating in the Library Scripts folder. That way, they'll appear directly in the Script Menuyou won't have to navigate through submenus to get to them . |
|
 | Figure 1-9. Here, the Navigation scripts (everything from New Applications Window to Open Special Window) were moved into the Finder Scripts subfolder. Then, the Navigation Scripts folder was deleted, leaving a Script Menu like this. You might want to merge the scripts from other folders, too. The first two scripts in Basics might fit better in the URLs submenu, for example, while the last script from Basics might fit better in the Script Editor Scripts submenu. |
|
|
