All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

glueing my life together

rjbs on 2004-05-29T03:50:20

I did a bunch of AppleScripting today, making me both like and dislike AppleScript more than ever. It reminds me of OLE and VBA in a lot of ways. The fact that so much stuff is scriptable is great. The underlying models are often not awful, and it's easy to do easy stuff. The problem isn't (always) the object models, but the language. Just like VBA, AppleScript sucks. I think it sucks differently, but it sucks nonetheless. It makes it easy to dismiss scripting of applications, in fact, which is sad.

Mac::Glue has been going a long way to make things easier, but there are still things I can do with AppleScript that I can't figure out with Mac::Glue. So far, Chris Nandor (the author of Mac::Glue) has been really friendly and helpful when I've asked questions, so I may keep doing that. Maybe I'll try to compile a quick list of recipes that demonstrate how basic AppleScript becomes basic Mac::Glue scripting.

My most useful script so far has been a little addrbook2mutt converter that creates a muttrc alias file for email addresses in my Address Book. It's helping me get my unix life and Mac life joined up again. It's good!

I wrote an AppleScript to update my birthday iCal, but I haven't been able to get it working in Mac::Glue. I'll post it once it's working, or once I give up. Either way, I'm trying to do what Chris had mentioned that one day: make non-free software unneeded. (Today, I deleted BirthdayCal.app.)

The Date::Holidays Plan

jonasbn on 2004-05-29T06:38:31

I am currently fooling around with Mac::Glue and iCal. I started out wanting to create a calendar for danish national holidays.

I of course wanted this to be able to handle more than danish holidays and this started my streamlining project of the Date::Holidays::* modules (ref: Date::Holidays).

I have later found out that I can download these resources from the Internet, but I still intend to finish my project, since it is more fun to do it yourself and I really want to learn how to work with Mac::Glue - so your examples and snippets would be VERY welcome.

Re:The Date::Holidays Plan

rjbs on 2004-05-29T11:43:37

I'm on it! :)

My current roadblock is my failure to get Glue to do what in AppleScript would be "tell calendar 1 to make new event at end with properties { ... }"

Re:The Date::Holidays Plan

waltman on 2004-05-29T12:57:11

Apple also has a bunch of national holiday calendars.