AppleScript

AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control of Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in macOS in a package of automation tools. The term AppleScript may refer to the scripting language, to a script written in the language, or to the macOS Open Scripting Architecture that underlies the language.

AppleScript is primarily a mechanism for driving Apple events – an inter-application communication (IAC) technology that exchanges data between and controls applications. Additionally, AppleScript supports basic calculations and text processing, and is extensible via scripting additions that add functions to the language.

AppleScript is tightly bound to the Mac environment, similar to how Windows Script Host is bound to the Windows environment. In other words, AppleScript is not a general purpose scripting language like Python. One way that AppleScript is bound to the unique aspects of its environment is that it relies on applications to publish dictionaries of addressable objects and operations.

As is typical of a command language, AppleScript is not designed to directly perform intensive processing. For example, a script cannot efficiently perform intensive math operations or complicated text processing. However, AppleScript can be used in combination with other tools and technologies which allows it to leverage more efficient programming contexts.

The language has aspects of structured, procedural, object-oriented and natural language programming, but does not strictly conform to any of these paradigms.

In the late 1980s, Apple considered using HyperCard's HyperTalk scripting language as the standard language for end-user development across the company and within its classic Mac OS operating system, and for interprocess communication between Apple and non-Apple products. HyperTalk could be used by novices to program a HyperCard stack. Apple engineers recognized that a similar, but more object-oriented scripting language could be designed to be used with any application, and the AppleScript project was born as a spin-off of a research effort to modernize the Macintosh as a whole and finally became part of System 7.

AppleScript was released in October 1993 as part of System 7.1.1 (System 7 Pro, the first major upgrade to System 7). QuarkXPress (ver. 3.2) was one of the first major software applications that supported AppleScript. This, in turn, led to AppleScript being widely adopted within the publishing and prepress world, often tying together complex workflows. This was a key factor in retaining the Macintosh's dominant position in publishing and prepress, even after QuarkXpress and other publishing applications were ported to Microsoft Windows.

After some uncertainty about the future of AppleScript on Apple's next generation OS, the move to Mac OS X (around 2002) and its Cocoa frameworks greatly increased the usefulness and flexibility of AppleScript. Cocoa applications allow application developers to implement basic scriptability for their apps with minimal effort, broadening the number of applications that are directly scriptable. At the same time, the shift to the Unix underpinnings and AppleScript's ability to run Unix commands directly, with the do shell script command, allowed AppleScripts much greater control over the operating system itself. AppleScript Studio, released with Mac OS X 10.2 as part of Xcode, and later AppleScriptObjC framework, released in Mac OS X 10.6, allowed users to build Cocoa applications using AppleScript.