Polishing your own apps

It is not hard to add a bit of polish to your own apps, even if they are only small AppleScript ones.

How to set up a folder action to automate document processing

Folder actions can do many useful things. Here I develop one to decompress Zip archives.

How to use AppleScript to automate image processing

Developing a droplet to scale and crop images, complete with source code in AppleScript.

Q&A: Sorting docs printed to PDF

How can I run a semi-automatic filing system for files printed to PDF?

Thank and be RESTful: how Twitter, Facebook, and many other apps work

Almost every app that you run – under OS X or iOS – which communicates with a remote web server will use RESTful APIs somewhere along the line.

Tell Mac speak human

We who forge words into documents lack anything as powerful as Illustrator or Photoshop are to graphics.

AppleScript – 21 years old and still going it alone on OS X

Old, often neglected, and only available on Macs, AppleScript should have been overwhelmed by numerous other scripting languages – if it were not for its unique abilities.

Over-engineering

At times trying to get Xcode to do what I want has felt like driving a car with a separate steering wheel, throttle and brake for each of its wheels.

Layout to database 2: Building a Database by Script

I have now used the first of three days allowed to rescue content from thousands of InDesign forms. Entering the second day, I had converted each document into a nest of IDML content, and needed to build that into the database.

Layout to database 1: Out of beauty comes forth structure

My task was to turn over 7500 files into a database, in which we could search, sort, and analyse – something normally viewed as requiring prolonged labour and great cost. I had just 3 days.