In the United States, today is the Labor Day holiday. For many students here, this is traditionally a moment when they think “Where the hell did my summer go?” rather than having any deep meditations on working or the nature of work, per se. It’s also an incredibly beautiful day here in New York City and, the holiday’s bloody origins notwithstanding, it’s clear that most people planned barbecues rather than marches to observe the occasion.

Spending a holiday outside in the fresh air without having to consider its origin is one of the privileges — maybe even one of the pleasures — of living in an affluent, First World country. And although I like a good burger as much as anyone, this year I am going to be a bit more reflective.

So I’m skipping the grilling and the sunshine — and I’m sitting at home instead, planning something else…

And So Begins “Scriptember”

Throughout September, Veritrope.com will continue it’s series on Travel and Technology — I’ve got some great, useful stuff coming up that I think you’ll enjoy!  But, at the same time, I going to try to connect both traveling and tech to something… bigger.

As I’ve mentioned before, tools aren’t nearly as interesting to me as how people use them. So we’re also going to shuffle a few other cards into our deck.  This month, we are going to take AppleScript — a basic programming tool included with every Mac — and we are going to do extraordinary things with it.

Extraordinary? AppleScript?

Uh-huh. We are going to use it as a pretext to explore something together:

How can you take your ordinary tools and, with a little imagination and creativity, use them to change your world for the better?

As some very smart people have suggested, you can probably do almost anything with a little help from your friends… and I have some very kind friends who are pitching in this month to help out. I’m calling our collective effort “Scriptember” — and I think you’ll be a fan once it gets the big reveal!

But let’s start things modestly by laying a little groundwork for the things coming later this month…

It Starts With A Whisper

Okay — just between us — I am opening up the Veritrope.com AppleScript Code Library for testing today.

There are some excellent resources to learn AppleScript available, but I hope to augment those by offering another resource to you here. It’s a place for you to share your bits of AppleScript with others — or to find some snippets of code you can reuse in your own AppleScript projects. Your fellow scripters can offer suggestions for streamlining your code… or offer their thanks for your help!

In the coming days, I’ll be posting new revisions of almost all the existing AppleScripts on this site into the code library. There will also be many brand-new projects coming — ones that will bring smiles to many faces!

And maybe most exciting of all, you will finally be able to add your own projects through this simple submission form.

It’s a little rough around the edges, so I’m going to give you guys a few days to play around with it while the look and workings are still being sorted out. Please try it out and let me know what you think. When I think it’s in fairly stable shape, I’ll add it to the navigation bar up top as a fully fledged part of this site. But for right now, it’s just for the people who read posts from beginning to end!

Stay In The Loop

Trust me — you aren’t going to want to miss what’s coming this month! Follow the Veritrope Twitter feed for the latest announcements or you can subscribe with your RSS reader if that’s how you roll.