An AppleScript Quine

A few days ago, out of morbid curiosity, I went looking for a a quine written in AppleScript. To my surprise, I couldn’t find one.
I’d never actually written a quine before, so this was a good ‘excuse’ to make one (and brush up on some computability theory — use it or lose it).
Well, here [...]

Better AppleScript Through Expressions

When writing a short AppleScript to complete a specific task, do not write a procedure that checks if A exists, then operates on it if it does. Instead, write an expression that operates on A, and ignore any exceptions caused by A not existing. Surrounding the statement in a try-block will ignore any [...]

(NS)AppleScript Sucks

EDITED TO ADD 2007-11-02: Some of the issues discussed in this article, like Script Editor messing with your code, have been addressed in Leopard. But until the majority of OS X users are on Leopard, they’re still a problem for most people. Also, I think it’s worth documenting just how many issues AppleScript tools [...]

tell application “YourGreatApp” NSAppleScript is here to save the day

Cocoa includes the wonderful NSAppleScript class, which lets you embed a high-level AppleScript code snippets in your Objective-C program. AppleScript is the bee’s knees for interfacing with other applications, particularly Apple programs and OS X itself. EDITED TO ADD: Unless you use threads in your program. Here is a more sobering [...]