I am wondering what the future of applescripting is. I have become pretty adept at it over the last couple years and have built a LOT of scripts that we use here at work very often and are gigantic time savers…
Will we get to a point where these will just no longer work? Has me worried. I am starting to learn Javascript as well so I"m hoping I’ll be able to transfer a lot when the time comes but some are pretty extensive…
Thanks.
I suspect that, aside from the unlikely event that someone from inside Apple chimes in here with non-public information, the only answers you’re going to get are basically “we don’t know.”
Trying to read into this, Apple was dedicating some resources to Applescript fairly recently. Applescript Objective-C was a big thing. There was Applescript Studio, then that was deprecated and Applescript was upgraded to a first-class language in X-Code. Things were happening on the Applescript front, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything (some projects have major resources thrown at them until the minute they’re cancelled), but could be some indication that they weren’t planning to abandon it.
However, in November of 2016, the head of Automation Technologies (Sal Soghoian, see this thread:
https://www.macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=45305) was let go, and as far as I’ve heard, Apple hasn’t said anything about the future of automation technologies since then, and hasn’t released anything demonstrating that they’re committing significant resources to it either. So that doesn’t look promising.
Applescript is old and has some problems. But as far as I’m aware, there’s no good replacement - I hear the attempts to allow Javascript and Python to handle controlling third party software the way Applescript does are incomplete/broken/frustrating. If I had to start all over with the workflow automation I do again today, I think I’d still have to choose Applescript as the language, weird and old and even possibly deprecated as it is. I’m writing the software requirements to contract the programming of a little glue-job process automation script that has to run on Windows right now. I could Applescript it in a day - the timeline for a Windows script is 2 weeks to beta. As far as I know, for gluing together separate apps into a workflow, nothing yet competes with 25-year old Applescript.
Thanks for the reply and thanks for the link to the other thread…I did a search before posting and didn’t find anything…
I’m ‘pretty’ sure that most of the stuff that I’m doing (mostly various Photoshop/Excel type functions and saving out files) can be done with javascript but I’d hate to have to start over with something that is working really good right now.
Thanks for the help.