Archive 26. July 2011

Creating Apps Using AppleScript Objective-C. Maybe I should just get the book here to satisfy my (rather perverse) curiosity about the AppleScript/Objective-C Bridge.

SuperCard on Lion. And since I just wrote about HyperCard, its spiritual successor - SuperCard - still exists and has been made fit for Lion again. But it's still a Carbon application, so its days are probably counted (or it will become increasingly difficult to integrate SuperCard into current developments if a switch to Cocoa does not take place). And I'm still tempted to buy it, even if it's just for nostalgia. The hacking feeling of HyperCard I only experienced again later in Smalltalk environments (and they are unfortunately also rather dead under OSX).

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Automation Release Notes. The worst language invention since HyperTalk has received a bunch of extensions in the Lion version, especially the integration of the Objective-C Bridge into the Apple Script Editor is funny - you can directly access Cocoa frameworks in scripts with it. Even though I believe that AppleScript has probably driven more programmers crazy than it has made life easier for users, it is always interesting from a linguistic historical point of view to see what is happening there. Since Snow Leopard with the Objective-C Bridge, it has been on the rise again and even in the current XCode 4.1 you can put applications together completely with the Interface Designer and AppleScript. Unfortunately, the application structure under Cocoa is definitely not suitable for non-programmers, so XCode with AppleScript applications is not really a revival of HyperCard (the only reason why I forgive HyperTalk - it was the language in this pretty brilliant little tool with great reach).