“I Four Years Old!”

You’ll notice how explicit I was in calling out each part of what I wanted to do.

This way of thinking in terms of “baby steps” towards your overall goal is probably the most important thing you can take from this lesson.

Here’s why — AppleScript is great, but teaching it to do what you want it to do can be like trying to teach a child. You really need to try and see things through the eyes of a kid (or, in this case, a computer that knows only what you tell it) in order to know how to communicate.

Rule #2:
AppleScript is like an energetic child. It’s eager to please — but in need of clear, constant direction.

It reminds me a bit of that old Bill Cosby comedy routine about a kid named Jeffery:

If you have any hope of getting off the plane with your sanity intact, you’re going to have to learn how to translate your adult language into something a kid can understand. That is to say, it’s something you’re absolutely going to be able to do — it’s just going to take a brief transition while you take a deep breath and mentally switch gears from your language and into theirs.

Sometimes, Kids Just Don’t Understand

I’ll make one more point using the “Talking To Kids Metaphor” as we end Part Two…

Every kid is different.
Some are barely able to tie their shoes.
Some come up to you and, unprompted, freak you out by asking if you’re an existentialist.

In the world of AppleScript, each of the applications on your Mac — programs like Apple Mail, Firefox, Evernote, iCal, etc. — are like kids at different grade levels. And, although you can sometimes guess, you’ll never really know which type of kid it is until you start talking to them and figure out their vocabulary level.

And this is the point where, thankfully, reality departs from the metaphor: In the computer world, you can actually see which words an application knows ahead of time — sparing you painful, Jeffery-like conversations. When it comes to speaking AppleScript, each program keeps a list of the vocabulary it knows in an AppleScript Dictionary. (Easy to remember, right?)

Ready To Talk?

In Part Three, we’ll open up that dictionary and start having an AppleScript conversation with a fairly “well-spoken” kid on the Application playground — Apple Mail!