Applescript

Mixin.com offer a Facebook app that creates a calendar file of your Facebook friends' birthdays that you can subscribe to in iCal. Take a look at www.fbcal.com. I wrote the following Applescript to copy your Facebook friends' birthdays into Address Book so that Dates to iCal could have access to these dates.

A while ago I came back to my home computer to find I had not logged out and things not as I left them. There were files on the Desktop with names like 'sdfgasfgafasz' and things moved or disappeared. It took this happening a couple of times before I connected it to my my three year old daughter and resolved to do something about it.

In OSX there are many ways ways to protect your login when you leave the computer, logging out, using a screen saver with a password etc. These all tend to have a shortcut (like ⌘⇧Q to log out of the current user or hot corners) but none of these quite fitted my usage.

I like how Applescript allows for quick solutions to what otherwise would be tricky problems to solve. Take the total number of events in an iCal calendar, this is a question asked recently on Apple Discussions. Counting them by hand would be a bore (especially with 40,000), but with Applescript it's as easy as:

tell application "iCal" to count events of calendars
(gives the result of 1279 currently for me.)

Applescripts I have written that others may be interested in.

These are mainly to do with Apple iCal, Mail and Address Book. All are free to download, but if you use any of these scripts regularly I'd appreciate a donation. Also, I'd love to hear any feedback you have on these.