Introduction to AppleScript Studio Programming Guide

AppleScript Studio Programming Guide provides the key information you’ll need to create AppleScript Studio applications.

AppleScript Studio is a powerful tool for quickly creating native Mac OS X applications that support the Aqua user interface guidelines. It combines features from AppleScript, Xcode, Interface Builder, and the Cocoa application framework. With AppleScript Studio, you can work in a full-featured development environment to create applications that use AppleScript scripts to control a broad range of Cocoa user-interface objects.

AppleScript Studio has something to offer both to scripters and to those with Cocoa development experience:

Who Should Read This Document

This document assumes that you have some familiarity with AppleScript and know how to write and execute scripts.

Previous experience building applications with an integrated development environment is also recommended—familiarity with Xcode and Interface Builder is especially useful.

Previous experience with Cocoa is not required, but can be helpful in understanding some of AppleScript Studio’s underlying mechanisms.

For documentation and other resources for these technologies, see See Also.

For information on whether AppleScript Studio is appropriate to your task, see Strengths and Limitations.

Organization of This Document

This document contains the following chapters:

Conventions

You’ll see the AppleScript continuation character (¬, which you create by typing Option-l) in some of the script listings in this document. When a line in a script ends with a continuation character, the next line is considered to be part of that line. You shouldn’t need the continuation character when you actually compile the scripts in AppleScript Studio, because you can use Xcode’s ability to wrap text instead. For more information, see How Xcode Formats Scripts.

Some listings in this document may use wrapped text, rather than the continuation character.

See Also

You can find getting started and overview documentation for AppleScript, AppleScript Studio, and related technologies, with links to all the available Apple documentation and resources (including mailing lists), here:

Because AppleScript Studio relies heavily on the Cocoa application framework, you may also want to visit the Cocoa Documentation area, particularly these documents:

You can also use any web search engine to many third-party books, products, and websites for AppleScript and AppleScript Studio.