AppleScript is already the province of IT professionals...
AppleScript is already the province of IT professionals...
- Subject: AppleScript is already the province of IT professionals...
- From: <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 14:39:30 -0600
Do your mother and daughter write their own scripts? (If so, rock on, more
power to them...)
My experience has been that AppleScript is already the province of IT
professionals. All my Mac experience has been in publishing and very few
"power users" ever wanted to learn AppleScript. They are aware of it and
appreciate its power and potential. But most (90% +) don't want to learn it
and make their AppleScripts. They would simply call me, or I would volunteer
to help make their jobs easier.
For them "the ease of use in AppleScript" means they can describe what they
want to happen and I can fairly quickly come up with a script. During
testing, I can open the script in front of them and they can sort of follow
along, but they don't want to deal with loops, variables, handlers... We
have to work together, combining their job expertise and my growing
knowledge of AppleScript.
These are top-notch publishing people (Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress,
Distiller....) When I come up with scripts that give them more time, they
don't spend it learning scripting, but how to do their jobs better (layout,
editing, color adjustment, etc...). Sometimes, they use the extra time to
take me to lunch :)
They think of AppleScript simply as a tool; think, "light switch or phone".
They don't care how it works as long as it does.
It's no big leap for me to learn UNIX commands as needed. That's what I do
with AppleScript; you can't know it all right away.
UNIX simply gives the Scripter more options.
Ron Bishop
Macintosh Systems Administrator
The Kansas City Star
1729 Grand Blvd.
Kansas City, MO 64108
816/234-4943
"I couldn't disagree more. The millions of iMac and colorful iBook sales
that kept Apple afloat weren't being made to professional video editors,
web publishers, and QXP users. They were sold to people who wanted a
more human-oriented alternative to the well-know horrors of Windows.
You can probably draw a line between tower buyers who are "us" and the
purchasers of all the other Apple machines who are "the rest of us".
I've been playing with computers since 1964 and command lines and
assembly language are not mysteries to me, but my 83-year-old mother
uses her iMac and my 18-year-old daughter uses her iBook because the
Apple human interface standards make them work like real-world objects do.
I don't know what OS X is doing for people who just want a machine
that's easy to use and is reliable. What I do know is that most of what
I see in MacWorld and on various internet forums is a lot of references
to UNIX command lines and utility commands. I think that if you have to
know UNIX to make your Mac do what you want it to do there is something
very wrong. If you have to know UNIX to write a simple AppleScript then
AppleScript will be the province of IT professionals and not what it was
designed to be. The iMac and iBook folks aren't going to learn it and
they're not going to pay us to write scripts and maintain their systems.
They're going to save time, money, and hassle by buying cheap Windows
machine like 95% of the world already does."
Marc K. Myers <email@hidden>
http://AppleScriptsToGo.com
4020 W.220th St.
Fairview Park, OH 44126
(440) 331-1074
[1/31/02 2:56:25 PM]
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