Hello!
I have coded some Xcode. I’m certainly not good, but I can do my small apps for my own needs. I just started with applescript too, because I really love the ability to make my days easier by the cute little script.
Now I have started to look at doing a combination of them, namely cocoa applescript. I have got it to work the way I want, but I do not know how to use them?
Strange huh? I know how I mix cocoa and apple script, but I do not know how I implement them, or to put it bluntly, what’s the point?
When, it is useful to mix in cocoa in applescript, and vice versa?
My second question is perhaps challenging to make on this forum. But my feeling is as a novice coders in apple environment, is that apple script is a bit dead in the evolution from apple. There is nothing they directly advertise when you’re on their developer program pages. Am I missing something, or are they not so interested in the apple applescript / automator anymore?
I’ve just discovered it and think it’s wonderful!
When you want to do something that one alone can’t do. For example, AppleScript has very limited interface capabilities. And Cocoa doesn’t talk to applications simply.
Actually, I would say the opposite about the evolution of Applescript lately. It has changed quite a bit in the last few years, become a lot more powerful, and more integrated with ObjC. If you mean “plain old” Applescript, it has not had a lot of outward changes, all the changes are on the ASOC front. I can certainly do A LOT more things now than I could 5 years ago. But the learning curve is higher as well for newbs.
AppleScriptObjC is a framework that binds AppleScript syntax with Objective-C/Cocoa. AppleScript and Cocoa are not related at all, the framework (read:bridge) makes it only possibly to have a gateway between them. Like PyObjc and many other brdiges before AppleScriptObjC, it doesn’t tell anything about the programming language itself. One day we had PyObjc and next release of XCode it wasn’t supported, while python as a multi platform language was still widely used even today. This can happen with AppleScriptObjC too but, again, that doesn’t say anything about AppleScript itself, Apple has stopped developing an framework for Objective-C.
AppleScript hasn’t changed much since the latest mayor update with the launch of Leopard. Mostly bugs and security fixes until now. But when you read the release notes you are aware that AppleScript itself is far from death.