Ask HN: What are you using AppleScript for?

I used it (well, Apple events, lower in the AppleScript stack) to generate piles of PDFs for from Quark for clients. Later book automation.

It was super handy for that sort of thing.

Sort of miss it, in a maybe-masochist kind of way.

Open tools to HTML are much nicer. And much less bizarre.

If anyone has some hairy InDesign or Quark or Illustrator thing they need automated, let me know.

...

...personally? lots of useful hotkeys.

But the shit keyboards finally drove me away. Linux on a XPS13 now.

I don't miss AppleScript the language. But I do miss the fact that it was sorta built into everything by default.

Spent the last few years developing my own end-user automation language for rendering templated artworks in Adobe Illustrator. Not written in AppleScript, mind (that language is a junker), but driving AI via the same Apple event interface that AppleScript talks to. Insanely powerful stuff.

Currently reimplementing Carbon AEDescs in pure Swift, to see if a modern high-level IPC framework that works across macOS, iOS, and Marzipan apps is feasible. (https://twitter.com/hhas02/status/1124763874413174786)

Developers generally hate AppleScript because it deliberately misleads them into believing Apple event IPC is OOP, then drives them absolutely nuts by acting in all sorts of very un-OO ways. However, once you realize that it’s not OOP at all, but RPC plus simple first-class relational queries… oh the possibilities. Interesting times.

I use it to control some Spotify actions assigned to keyboard shortcuts via Alfred.

mostly use AppleScript with iTunes, such as rating songs playing with Alfred and various Doug's AppleScript for itunes. Actually I learn AppleScript by tuning Doug's script for my own needs.

Mostly just glue type stuff.