Mac Automation Made Simple Video Podcast > Getting Started Providing Feedback in AppleScript

Episode 25
Date: 09.29.2009
Duration: 00:07:59
Getting Started Providing Feedback in AppleScript
In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to provide a basic level of feedback, such as dialog messages, audio alerts, and speech alerts in AppleScript. Providing feedback is essential to building user friendly scripts..
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MacScripter AppleScript Studio Article > Getting Started with Displaying Progress in AppleScript Studio

Getting Started with Displaying Progress in AppleScript Studio.

One very common use for AppleScript is batch processing. Scripts of this nature will often loop through multiple items, performing some type of automated task for each item being processed. An example of this might be a script that loops through a folder of image files, converting each one to another format.

A script of this nature that is created with Script Editor, and then run, may work just fine. However, visually, it is less than spectacular. Other than a spinning cursor, and perhaps a dialog message displayed here or there during script execution, the user does not usually receive a very good visual representation of what is occurring.

This is where AppleScript Studio can come in handy. In this month's column, we will discuss adding progress bars and spinners to an AppleScript, in order to provide a visual representation of what is being processed, how much processing is complete, and how much processing remains during script execution. [Read more at MacScripter...]

MacTech AppleScript Essentials Column > Providing Progress Feedback During Script Execution

January, 2006 - Providing Progress Feedback During Script Execution.

Many AppleScripts do not provide progress updates to the user during processing. Most of the time, when a script is run, it simply performs the appropriate tasks "behind the scenes," so to speak. If run as an application, a script may appear in the Dock when launched. However, this hardly provides detailed information to the user about what is actually occurring. Sometimes, a script may not need to provide progress updates to the user. However, there are situations when providing such feedback is a good idea.

In this month's column, we will walk through the process of creating a script that will provide visual progress information to the user during processing. The script we will create will save selected email messages in Mail as text files into a user-specified output folder. Since the script will have the ability to process multiple selected email messages, we will write our code to provide a visual indication to the user of which message is currently being processed. Once you learn how to provide this type of feedback, then you can begin integrating this same technique into your other scripts, making them more user friendly. [Read more at MacTech.com...]

MacTech AppleScript Essentials Column > User Interaction Basics

August 2004 - User Interaction Basics.

Last month, we looked at some of the features of the new Script Editor, which was released with Mac OS X Panther (10.3). Now we are going to get started with actually writing some AppleScript code! This month's article will explain how, with only minimal code, you can update your AppleScripts to interact with the user. We will primarily focus on displaying dialogs and prompting for data. [Read more at MacTech.com...]