The Turd that is AppleScript

I am¹ an Apple fan.

I like Mac’s
and iPhones
and iPads
and iEtc’s
but, professionally, I am a Windows engineer.

I am a qualified network engineer and software administrator. My experience has primarily been around Windows hardware, OS, and software.

I program and script in KiXtart as my main language of choice, and can also code in VBScript, AHK, AutoIt, shell, and bat.

I have experience in HTML, JavaScript, and XML.

So as an Apple-only man at home, I thought it was about time I learnt to script in the Mac world.

I attempted to write in AppleScript this last weekend; put simply, it’s a turd!²
Seriously, a turd!

I had created a Codeless Language Module for TextWrangler (and BBEdit) so that I could script KiX on my Mac’s with complete syntax highlighting (soon to be available on this site!) and wanted to create an installer so that I could easily provide my CLM to others.

I thought to myself “you know what, I reckon I could do a few minor things in AppleScript and create an ‘Application’ from that … win!”

Seriously, how wrong was I?!

I want to see if an application is installed. Simple task.
AppleScript has great power with utilising installed applications, so I thought something along the lines of:

if exists application "TextWrangler" then
    # code if true
end if

Seems simple right? Code logic (kinda) seems plausible?

WRONG!!!

I Bing’d
I Googled
I tweeted

I could barely find a damned thing about identifying if an application is installed with AppleScript³.
The one option I did find was massive, convoluted, and seemed a bit … well, stupid.

So what did I do?
This:

set existTW to "NotInstalled"

try
    set existTW to do shell script "ls /Applications | grep 'TextWrangler'"
end try

if existTW does not contain "TextWrangler" then
    display dialog "It ain't installed!" buttons {"Drat…"} default button 1 with icon stop
    return 5
end if

All thid does is set existTW to a value, list the /Applications directory and find anything containing the text “TextWrangler” and set existTW to that output.

If nothing in /Applications contains the text, it will not alter the value of existTW (which was set to “NotInstalled” earlier) and there are no errors and the if statement will display a prompt stating no application installed, will stop running, and exit with the code 5⁴.

Not quite as succinct as I had wanted, but heck, it works.

Next I wanted to get the directory that the AppleScript is running from.
Again, shouldn’t be that hard.

In KiX, it’s a macro called @ScriptDir
In bat (cmd), it’s %~dp0
In shell (.sh), it’s dirpath $0

So it should be easy in AppleScript right?

Again, WRONG!

AppleScript does have a function called “path to me”, but that returns folder:to:script.script

I want the parent folder of the script …

And what the hell is with the path syntax?! I want to be able to pass these details to shell, which I cannot do with the path having : instead of / separating the folders/files :/

My solution (with some help from my good friend Bartron) turned out to be this:

set x to POSIX path of (POSIX file ((POSIX path of (path to me)) & "/..") as text)

W …
T …
F?!

Why does it have to be such a turd of a process to get the fucking parent directory of the script?!

Anyway, I was trying to get the script to do a bunch of other stuff too, and it just wasn’t working the way I wanted. In the end, I created 2 shell scripts that do the main parts of the install, and I’m using AppleScript as the container/controller and for the message boxes.
AppleScript does some pretty funky things with basic message boxes (display dialog).

All in all though, I’ve learnt a tonne. AppleScript IS a powerful beast with some great abilities.
But it is also a great big giant turd :P