Donovan Preston, InterSight
Track: Python
Date: Wednesday, July 09
Time: 1:45pm - 2:30pm
Location: Portland
The AppleEvent architecture is an inter-application communication protocol that provides a foundation for scripting applications on Mac OS. Apple has successfully migrated AppleEvents to the Mac OS X architecture, exposing a rich set of functionality to Mac OS X users. By binding Python to the AppleEvent architecture, Python can harness commercial application functionality.
Harness
AppleEvents on Mac OS X give you all the same benefits of scriptable COM applications on Windows, without the Windows or the COM.
By tapping into the rich functionality exposed by many available OS X applications, Python programmers can perform tasks that would be difficult or costly to implement from scratch.
Extend
Programmers can use the wide variety of Python modules available to quickly create new applications that expose these tasks to command-line scripts, GUI applications, and web applications.
Preston discusses scripting some of Apple's iLife applications from Python, for example displaying your appointments from iCal in a web page, and creating a web control panel for iTunes. He also briefly discusses scripting commercial applications such as Adobe Photoshop.
