The Easy Way

1. Just download the precompiled Quit application we put together.
2. You’re done, unless you want to assign it to a keyboard shortcut, in which case, read the Assigning a Keyboard Shortcut section below.

The Hard Way

1. Fire up the AppleScript Editor, which is located in /Applications/Utilities.
2. Copy this code and paste it into the AppleScript Editor window:
   

   tell application "System Events" to set the visible of every process to true
   set white_list to {"Finder"}
   try
   tell application "Finder"
      set process_list to the name of every process whose visible is true
   end tell
   repeat with i from 1 to (number of items in process_list)
     set this_process to item i of the process_list
     if this_process is not in white_list then
       tell application this_process
         quit
       end tell
     end if
   end repeat
   on error
   tell the current application to display dialog "An error has occurred!" & return & "This script will now quit" buttons {"Quit"} default button 1 with icon 0
   end try
   

3. Save it as an application and give it a name (may I suggest “Quit”?).
4. That’s it. You can move it to your desktop so you can run it before you shut down, but that’s inefficient, isn’t it? Read on to find out how to assign it to a keyboard shortcut.

Assigning a Keyboard Shortcut

1. Open up Automator (/Applications/Utilities) and choose to create a new service.
2. Set Service receives to no input and leave everything else alone.
3. Search for launch application in the search field on the left pane and drag the resulting action over to the right pane. Your Automator window should look like this:
   
4. Save it and give it a name. I used Foo.
5. Open up System Preferences and click on Keyboard (or Keyboard & Mouse, depending on your version of OS X).
6. Go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and click on Application Shortcuts in the left pane.
7. Click the + symbol to add a new shortcut and make sure the Application popup list is on All Applications.
8. Put whatever name you gave the service you created earlier in the Menu Title field. It has to be the exact name, meaning capitalization matters.
9. Click on the Keyboard Shortcut field and enter whatever shortcut you want. Shift-Command-Q is already taken by the system, so I used Option-Command-Q. Your window should look like this:
   
10. Click Add, and you’re done.

Conclusion

Now you’re ready to take over the world. Well, maybe not, but you are ready to shut down.

Would you like to be able to use the magic of Bluetooth to automatically pause iTunes, set your away message in Adium, and lock the screen simply by standing up and walking away from your desk? Of course you would — it’s future-tastic (jetpacks not included)! Let’s take a look at how to pull this off.

What You’ll Need

First you’ll need a copy of Proximity, a handy (and free) little application which monitors your Bluetooth-enabled device and fires off AppleScripts when it leaves and enters connection range. As an added touch, we’ll also use a copy of DeskShade to lock and unlock the computer with style, leaving a nice away message displayed on the screen and opening a “Hacker Log” to display what activity took place while you were away.

DeskShade actually does a lot more than just allow AppleScript to lock and unlock your screen. I won’t go into a full review of it here, but essentially, it will also help keep your desktop clean, your wallpaper fresh, and your mind uncluttered. If, however, you want to forgo the use of DeskShade, you can instead lock and unlock the computer by having AppleScript launch your screensaver and adjust the security settings required for waking it up. AppleScript files for both approaches can be downloaded here (8kb, ZIP).

Getting Set Up

Install Proximity, and from within the preferences pane select your Bluetooth device. I used my iPhone, but any “discoverable” device should work. In the AppleScript section link to OutofRange.scpt for when the device moves out of range and InRange.scpt for when it moves back in range. Make sure that monitoring is enabled and set a frequency for proximity checks — I used 60 seconds. If you decided not to go the DeskShade route, then just swap in the second set of scripts for that step above and skip ahead to the testing.

Install DeskShade and on the DeskLock tab set a password, enable AppleScript to unlock, set the Hacker Log to open after unlocking and set the away message to something appropriate. I used the same “More than 30ft away from my computer” message that is set in Adium via the out-of-range script.

Future Perfect

It’s as simple as that. Get up and take a walk around to test it out; by the time you get back, your computer should be unlocked, and you can have a look at the Hacker Log to see what happened while you were gone. Now all we need are jetpacks, flying cars, and a reliable way to prevent “sock-loss” when doing the laundry, and it will be future perfect.

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This article will focus on showing the scriptability of Numbers by writing a very small script to retrieve data from Yahoo! Finance and put it into a custom table.

Numbers Scripting Definitions

To get an idea of what you have at your disposal, fire up /Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor and select File->Open Dictionary… and choose Numbers from the dialog:

You will should see a window that looks a bit like this:

You should definitely take some time to peruse all the options available at your disposal but you will find that, while Apple has provided many ways to manipulate the contents of documents, sheets, tables, cells and rows, there is a distinct lack of functions related to charting/graphing. Perhaps an incremental update or Numbers X will correct this oversight.

Directing the Data

Yahoo! Finance has a very nice historical data view for closing stock prices. Even with all of the enhancements, Numbers still lacks one of the nicest features of Excel: the ability to grab data from a URL. To remedy this, we can create an AppleScript that:

• lets us input the symbol of the stock we are interested in
• fetch the data from Yahoo! Finance
• and populate a new table in Numbers with this data

Part’s one and two are pretty straightforward AppleScript:

set tempFile to ((path to temporary items) as string) & "yahoo-quote"

-- get company to display from the user
display dialog "Enter symbol:" default answer "AAPL"
set company to text returned of result

-- download the file
tell application "URL Access Scripting"
 set theURL to "http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=" & company & "&a=00&b=1&c=2008&g=d&ignore=.csv"
 download theURL to file tempFile
end tell

Here’s where it gets interesting. First, we tell Numbers (the script assumes the app is open with a document ready) to become active and make the most recent document the one we want to work in. We then read in the data from Yahoo! to determine how many rows we need and use the header line to determine how many columns we need and then make a new table with this information:

tell application "Numbers"
	activate
	tell document (count of documents)
		tell sheet 1
			-- read in the file contents
			set quoteLines to paragraphs of (read file tempFile)
			set quoteValues to {}
			-- get number of rows for the table
			set nRows to length of quoteLines
			-- get number of columns for the table
			-- (grab header row first)
			set tempLine to item 1 of quoteLines
			-- we need to split the line with commas as delimeters
			set oldDelims to AppleScript's text item delimiters
			set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ","
			set headers to every text item of tempLine
			set nCols to length of headers
			-- make a new Numbers table that fits the # rows & cols in the CSV file
			make new table with properties {name:company, row count:nRows, column count:(nCols + 1)}

Finally, we loop through each line (row) and copy the data from each column to the correct cell, then we delete the temporary file we created at the beginning:

tell table (count of tables) -- the one we just made is the last
				delete column 1 -- labels we don't need
				set nRow to 1
				repeat with aLine in quoteLines
					set cellValues to every text item of aLine
					set nCol to 1
					repeat with aCell in cellValues
						set value of cell nCol of row nRow to aCell
						set nCol to nCol + 1
					end repeat
					set nRow to nRow + 1
				end repeat
			end tell
			-- we need to put the delimeters back
			set AppleScript's text item delimiters to oldDelims
		end tell
	end tell
end tell
tell application "Finder" to delete file tempFile

When you run the script (download the source), you will be able to watch Numbers create the new table and populate all of the cells.

This particular script duplicates a built-in functionality of Numbers: the ability to read CSV files. However, you could very easily modify it to use AppleScript to tweak the data or make a call out to a Python or Perl script to do even more substantial modifications then bring the information back in. The fundamental purpose of the script is to demonstrate just how easy it is to address cells and rows. Reading data is just as easy — set v to value of cell x of row y — and that opens up a whole host of possibilities, such as using an active Numbers sheet to send data to a web service via a global-hotkey-enabled AppleScript action.

Make sure to drop a note in the comments with how are you using the new scripting functionality in Apple’s latest iWork suite.

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The problem lies with getting this information onto said device. to make my life easier, I use a utility that first appeared in OS X 10.4 called textutil. As you will see, the utility of this small tool goes far beyond formatting content for eBook readers. As always, fire up Terminal.app and have it ready to roll as we delve once again down to the command line.

Formats A-Plenty

While I have a very specific and regular use-case for textutil, there are plenty of features that make it a highly useful and general purpose tool. (For most of the examples, I will be using text and HTML version of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens) The first lies in format support. textutil can convert from/to txt, html, rtf, rtfd, doc, docx, wordml, odt and webarchive. Picture a scenario where you receive a large number of HTML documents from an existing project that are just wretched and you really only need access to the raw text to begin anew. While you may have techniques for stripping HTML tags, textutil can do the heavy lifting for you with ease:

$textutil -convert txt ChristmasCarol.html

Since you can specify as many files as you like on the command line, batch processing an entire directory is just as easy:

$textutil -convert txt *.html

If you have an article broken up into many pieces and want to convert (or keep in the same format) and concatenate them into one large file just use the -cat option:

$textutil -cat html *.txt

If you have a look at the texutil manual page, you will see that you have complete control over the location, name and extension of output files and can even specify font name and style. This is very handy for my use-case since I have a certain base font size I like to use with the reader:

textutil -convert rtf -font Times -fontsize 14 ArticleToConvert.html

You also do not need to save HTML files from your browser first. The -stdin option lets you work some further command line magic (by pairing textutil with curl) to convert your data directly from the web:

$curl --silent http://slashdot.org/ | textutil -stdin -convert txt -output slashdot.txt

Metadata Madness

textutil does its best to preserve file information, but you may not want to keep such data around or you may want to modify it in some way. The -strip option clears away all metadata while the -title, -author, -subject, -comment, -editor, and -company flags all take parameters that let you specify your own values for each field. You can add your own metadata keywords via the -keywords option and even modify the creation and modification dates through -creationtime and -modificationtime flags.

Unearthing textutil From the Command Line

While dropping into Terminal.app to do some conversions is fine, it would be easier for most users if there was a more accessible way to perform conversion tasks, especially if they are somewhat routine operations. For this, we turn to the power of AppleScript and its ability to make Droplets, which are nothing more than applications that respond to specific events. Fire up Script Editor and enter the following code:

on open droppedFiles
	repeat with macFile in droppedFiles
		set unixFile to quoted form of POSIX path of macFile
		set shellScript to ("/usr/bin/textutil -convert rtf -font Times -fontsize 14 " & unixFile)
		display alert shellScript
		do shell script shellScript
	end repeat
	return
end open

Save the script as both a normal script (so you can edit it later) and then save it as an application (so you can make it a Droplet). Now you have a handy tool which you can drop any number of files on to batch convert right from the Finder. You can customize this script to perform the transformations you need and create as many droplets as you see fit.

Download the source code

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Let’s first start out by downloading the script from here:

Timeout Apple Script (ZIP)

After your download is complete unzip and open the script the script (double click it to launch the OS X script editor). To being using this script you will have to know: the IP Address of the server you are connecting to, the name of the folder you want to connect to, your username, your password, and the amount of time in seconds that you want between connection attempts (idle time). All of the items in purple in the picture below are the ones you are going to need to edit (Make sure to remove all the parenthesis – completely replace everything in purple).

Once you have input all your information, go ahead and click the “Run” button to test it. If everything is working properly the share should mount. After you confirm your script is working, it is time to save it as an application:

1. Go to File > Save As
2. File Format: application

   

3. Check the following Options: Run only, Stay open

   

4. Click save

Ok, now we have an application so go ahead and drop it into your applications folder on your Mac. I have a folder under Applications called “scripts,” to help stay a little more organized. To take this to the next level, I went ahead and put it in my Login Items so that it launches when I start my Mac, and I’m immediately connected to the shares.

To add the application to the Login Items:

1. Go to Applications > System Preferences
2. Go to Accounts

   

3. Go to the Login Items tab

   

4. Finally, drag and drop your application into the Login Items list.
5. Congratulations! Your computer will now auto-mount your share when you start her up, and keep you connected throughout the day.

As a side note, this script is far from perfect. When it’s running it freezes finder for a few seconds, and it must be force quit when restarting, but it’s a great solution if you do not have administrative access to the share. Have fun!

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Back in 2007, MacTech Magazine produced a comprehensive guide to scripting Office 2008 that has become somewhat of a de-facto reference guide for scripting Office 2008. The Microsoft Mac Business Unit realized how valuable this guide is for Mac power users & IT staff and has sponsored both free downloads of the publication (in PDF form) and a free subscription to MacTech Magazine. They have also worked with MacTech Magazine to offer the ability to order hard copies of the 150-page book that also includes a complementary subscription to the magazine.

The guide is available online and the sponsored free PDF is available here. You can order the hardcopy version via this link.

“Free” is somewhat subjective in that you’ll need to pay $9.99USD shipping and handling, but that is well-below the magazine subscription price and a the equivalent of 2-3 Starbucks beverages. But, you may access the online version completely without charge (you’ll just need to pay price of time and mouse-click wear-and-tear) and no strings attached.

Here’s what you can look forward to:

• Introduction: Converting VBA Macros to AppleScript in Microsoft Office
  VBA is going away in Office 2008 for Mac. Learn about the challenges and the benefits.

• Chapter 1: AppleScript Basics
  Tools, Resources and First Steps in AppleScript Syntax

• Chapter 2: AppleScript in Microsoft Office (General)
  Issues in converting VBA to AppleScript in Word, Excel and PowerPoint

• Chapter 3: Word
  Word VBA Macros to AppleScript

• Chapter 4: Excel
  Excel VBA Macros to AppleScript

• Chapter 5: PowerPoint
  PowerPoint VBA Macros to AppleScript

• Chapter 6: Entourage
  An Introduction to Entourage Scripting (No VBA Anywhere in Sight)

• Chapter 7: Resources
  Books, References, and Tools discussed in Moving from MS Office VBA to AppleScript

If you are a hardcore Office scripter and have some great tips and/or scripts to share, drop a note in the comments.

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