About rb-appscript

Ruby appscript (rb-appscript) is a high-level, user-friendly Apple event bridge that allows you to control AppleScriptable Mac OS X applications from Ruby.

Requirements

Appscript supports Ruby 1.8 and later.

Appscript requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Installation

To install appscript, cd to the rb-appscript-0.6.1 directory and run:

ruby extconf.rb
make
make install

Building appscript from source requires the gcc compiler supplied with Apple’s Xcode IDE. Xcode can be obtained from Mac OS X installer disks or <developer.apple.com>.

Please note that the version of Ruby included with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is missing the header files needed to build appscript on PPC-based Macs. Tiger users can avoid this issue by installing the latest version of Ruby from <www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/> and updating their shell login profiles to suit.

Notes

  • rb-appscript 0.6.0+ supports string encodings in Ruby 1.9+; see the CHANGES file and documentation for details.

  • Developer tools for exporting application dictionaries (ASDictionary) and converting application commands from AppleScript to appscript syntax (ASTranslate) are available separately:

    http://appscript.sourceforge.net/tools.html

    ASDictionary 0.13.1 or later is also required to use rb-appscript’s built- in #help method. If ASDictionary isn’t installed, interactive help won’t be available but appscript will continue to operate as normal.

Copyright

Appscript is released into the public domain, except for the following code:

  • extconf.rb, which is a modified version of the RubyAEOSA/RubyOSA install script; see code for details

  • safeobject.rb, which is a modified version of basicobject <facets.rubyforge.org> released under the Ruby License; see code for details

  • SendThreadSafe.h/SendThreadSafe.m, which are modified versions of Apple code (developer.apple.com/samplecode/AESendThreadSafe); see code for details