Elegant Chaos

Tom Smith and I were just discussing Applescript, and we just realised... it's a read-only language!

 It's easy to read, but near-impossible to write, due to the weird and shifting syntax caused by the interaction of the various applications you're trying to script.

This is a feature which is strangely lacking from Safari.

Luckily, here's a script which will do the job.

It's amazing how easily I can get distracted.

Currently my main distraction is playing with Feed Me, my bayesian news filter, which is a thinly veiled excuse to mess about with Python.

However, yesterday I managed to get distracted from that distraction.

I've been thinking that I really need to sort out some productivity tools for myself, to deal with the sort of repetitive administrative tasks that I find myself doing again and again.

To that end, I installed FastScripts, and set about writing some trivial scripts to do some simple things.

One of the scripts I wanted was to find all the recent mails received from a particular person, since this is something that I do manually quite often. The script would only save a few keystrokes and mouse clicks, but I figured that if I could link it to a hot key with FastScripts, it would be handy.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Apple Mail's scripting support doesn't allow you to perform searches.

Luckily, there is a work around, in the form of the new GUI scripting capabilities of MacOS X.

Essentially, this allows you to 'fake' any user interface operation by scripting it in terms of the menus, buttons and or places that you would click, and the keys that you would press.