SCRIPTING APPLE APPS in Objective-C

Painting QR-Code in Objective-C SCRIPTING APPLE APPS

When testing this script in full, you ll need to make up a dummy message in Mail with similar content to that in Figure 26-2 and send it to yourself. Once you receive it, select it in Mail, and run the script as normal. If you re testing only the second and third parts of the script, you could comment out the first part of the script and add some temporary code to supply the test data directly: set attendee_count to 4 set attendee_name_list to {missing value, missing value, missing value, missing value} set attendee_address_list to {"jane@att.com", "drake@att.com", "bob@att.com", "joe@att.com"} set message_subject to "Project management meeting" set message_text to "When: Monday, May 29, 2006 10:00 AM-11:00 AM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada). Where: Meeting room 12, 6th floor *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Weekly meeting to assess progress." Once you ve finished testing, remember to delete or comment out the test code, and then reenable the original code for getting the data from Mail. In the second part, lines 13 through 27, you parse out the information you need from the mail message. You can do that in many ways, but the result has to be pretty much the same. You need to end up with three pieces of information for the iCal event: start time, end time, and location. The way I tackled it in the script is by breaking the message into paragraphs and then examining each paragraph using a repeat loop. If the paragraph starts with When:, then I know it has the date information; if it starts with Where:, then it has the location. More specifically, I parse out the date information from the When: paragraph in two steps. The full line (broken onto two lines) is as follows: When: Thursday, April 29, 2004 10:00 AM-11:00 AM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) but I needed this: Thursday, April 29, 2004 10:00 AM-11:00 AM So, I start by getting all the text from the second to the fifth word (line 17), which also omits the end time, which I don t need. The final part of the script creates the event (lines 28 through 41). You create the actual event object in line 31, assigning custom values to the summary and assigning start and end date properties during the creation process. You then assign the result of the make command to the variable new_event. In lines 32 40 you add the elements to the event. You start by adding a single e-mail alarm element, and then you loop through the list of attendee e-mail and name lists to add them as attendees to the event.

Another neat feature of iCal is that you can schedule compiled AppleScript files to run. To do that, create a new event in iCal, and set the date and time you want the script to execute on. Then add an open file alarm, and specify the script file you want to execute.

iChat is a small application, so it s not surprising it has only three classes and three commands defined in it. Besides the application class, iChat has an account class and a service class. Different account elements in the iChat application correspond to different people you chat with. Accounts can be referenced either from the service they belong to or from the application directly. iChat has only a handful of properties, as you may imagine, and you can t change most of them. In fact, the only two significant properties belong to the application class, and they are status and status message. All properties of the account and service classes are read-only. One of the properties scripters like to have fun with is the status message property. This is the message that appears both at the top of your iChat window and as your status on your buddies iChat windows. The property is simple; you can simply set it to any string: tell application "iChat" to set status message to "Honey, I'm Home" Script 26-11 acts as an iChat status message agent. It is saved as a stay-open application and uses the on idle handler. The script will check to see the current track name and playlist name in iTunes and alternate them every five seconds as the status message. This way your buddies can know you re available and know what song you happen to be listening to at the moment. Script 26-11. 1. property flag : true 2. property original_message : "" 3. on run 4. tell application "iChat" 5. set original_message to status message 6. end tell 7. end run 8. on idle 9. try 10. tell application "iTunes" 11. set this_track to name of current track 12. set this_playlist to name of current playlist 13. end tell 14. set status_message to "Available and listening to " 15. if flag then 16. set status_message to status_message & "track: " & this_track 17. else 18. set status_message to status_message & "playlist:" & this_playlist 19. end if 20. on error 21. set status_message to "Available and listening to nothin'" 22. end try 23. tell application "iChat" 24. set status message to status_message 25. end tell