i've been playing around with AppleScript lately. it's a nice language for what it's supposed to do. however, it's not any good unless the applications that should be scriptable actually do what they say they should do.
today i discovered that URL Scripting Access can download a web page and save it in a file. when i open the file with TextEdit, it looks like the web page. that may not seem very exciting, but a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away i had to write an HTML->PS converter so i could make thumbnails of web pages. it was a pain in the ass. however, since MacOS X can save as PDF files, all i need to do is tell TextEdit to save it as a PDF, then i can resize it how i like. seems really simple. however, TextEdit, or any other application i looked at, doesn't support the AppleScript 1.3ish extensions to "print" that let me set the print properties and skip the dialog. i was hoping that Perl could do a bit of gluing between MacOS apps, but it looks like a lot of AppleScript support isn't all that useful for non-interactive automation, but some things are still hard in Perl even though things like TextEdit solve. the AppleScript bummers in iTunes are frustrating too. it's really easy to do cute things, but when i get down to Laziness, things are hard, or not even possible. even if i wanted to and could fix the AppleScript support on these apps, i can't fix them on everybody's machine. now the further bummer: since the apps don't do what they should be able to do (according to what they advertise), no matter how awesome Perl is, it can't get around that without lots of third-party modules. that's a lot to ask for an end user. so, stick to the command line, learn Cocoa or whatever, or retire and move to the Caymans? :)
