Filed under: Developer, Macintosh, Apple, Open Source
Ruby meets AppleScript with RubyOSA
by Jordan Running Oct 26th 2006
Most days I'm totally happy with my Windows PC, but some days I want a Mac.* I've got a thing for scripting of all kinds, and the days I most want a Mac, it seems, are when I see someone doing something really cool with AppleScript, like RubyOSA. To quote its web site, "RubyOSA is a bridge that connects Ruby to the Apple Event Manager infrastructure. In big words, it allows you to do in Ruby what you could do in AppleScript." It fetches information from OS X apps about their components and then maps them directly to Ruby classes and methods. While AppleScript isn't exactly fugly, I'm a big Ruby fan and seeing it do stuff like this really gets my vitals up. I would love to say "I wish someone would do this kind of thing for Windows apps," but the tragedy is that Windows has no standard scripting interface like AppleScript, and certainly none that is widely implemented.*For the record, some days I want to ditch everything for Ubuntu instead. And now, back to your regularly scheduled not-quite-so-uber-geeky programming.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
