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sidebars) may change the number of the element you want. However, this can be problematic as well, as different view options (e.g. When they have none of these attributes, you really have no choice but to use a number (as in “tell window 1”). ‘tell “loading iTunes store” to…’), I have had really inconsistent results doing this. and while I have seen some scripts employing strategies like ‘tell the first UI element whose role is “AXLink” to…’ and others that just use the title (e.g. As you can see in the Attributes, there are descriptions and roles and titles…. However, one of the biggest problems is what to call each UI Element. Tell screen 1 to tell divider 1 to tell button 1 to perform action "AXPress" In such a case, it’s possible that the screen UI Element is set up as the “parent” of the divider UI element, which is the parent of the button “UI Element.” You’ll eventually be using these to build a command such as What this means is that you might be looking at a screen with a divider and a button on the right side of the divider. These are useful for navigating to parents, children, and siblings of a given UI element. …and here’s the Accessibility Inspector when locked on that element.
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Like it says at the bottom, you can lock it (cmd F7) while hovering over a particular item that you’re interested (such as a button you want the script to click) to give you a static display of the hierarchy and attributes of that UI element.įor example, here’s the Download All Free Updates button in iTunes that I alluded to above… Both the Hierarchy and Attributes panes are dynamic and will change as you move your mouse cursor over various parts of a given app. So this is what Accessibility Inspecture looks like. This will probably make more sense if you start it up as you read along. I’m not inclined to give a comprehensive overview of how Accessibility Inspector works, but I will mention a few things.
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One tool that helps out considerably is Apple’s Accessibility Inspector, which comes as part of Xcode (available for free in the Mac App Store).
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Instead, you have to navigate through tons of ambiguously named documents and windows and UI elements and find out what they want to be called and build those into your Applescript. Besides, if you wanted to share your script, everyone with a different screen size or device would have to reinvent the wheel. You don’t want to tell it to just click a certain point on the screen, since if the screen layout changed for some reason it might just click the “delete everything and make my Mac explode” button or something. One example of putting this to use is my UpdateiOSApps.scpt I wrote a few months ago, which uses some UI scripting to get iTunes to the iOS Apps screen (cmd 7), check for new apps (cmd r), and download the updates. I think Python might be able to accomplish this with Appscript, but other than that, I’d say AppleScript is one of the only ways to do this. One of the handy things AppleScript can do is simulate mouse clicks and keyboard keystrokes through a process called UI Scripting, which uses the System Events app. It’s close enough to plain English that even beginners like me can read a script and understand a good amount of what it’s trying to accomplish, then use that as a framework to write their own custom scripts to automate myriad tasks on a Mac. I generally think AppleScript is a lot of fun. Also, keep in mind that you have to tell System Events to tell application process UI elements… if you forget “process” it’s not going to work.
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Update 20140802: The most important part of the post starts down at the UI elements section below. Bottom Line: Getting AppleScript to simulate clicks and keystrokes can be frustrating, but using Accessibility Inspector and the “UI Elements” command can make it easier.