Hello, welcome to the World Wide Developer Conference, this is the second automation session today, how many went to first session this morning...okay. So our little presentation about Libraries kind of got to you a little bit huh, you're interested in this. This session we go in depth in discussing AppleScript Libraries and we'll examine not only simple but complex ones and we'll walk you through the process of how you create those including for the first time ever anywhere an example of how to create a scripting dictionary.

I think once you see how it's done, it's not so frightening it's pretty easy to do it's just an XML file. So today we're going to be talking about AppleScript Libraries and what they can do for you. Let's try click, welcome, today it's AppleScript Libraries, we covered that and we're going to be learning about what they are, how you incorporate them into your environment, how you call them, how use them, how you create them and how you can deploy them.

So begin with, why Libraries...those who were at the first session understand that I'm one of those kind of people that is a code maven, I have sampled routines that do just about everything and I have them all over the place on my drives and I'm very thankful now that we have iCloud support so I can keep them in one central location but I like to use routines and handlers in my scripts quite a bit instead of writing code over and over, I like just getting the routines and handlers and pasting them into my scripts.

So if you're like me and you use the same routine over and over you're going to like Libraries, they're going to be useful for you. Again if you are a person that uses third party scripting additions to find that command that was missing in AppleScript you're going to like Libraries as well.

If you just want to be someone that can simplify your scripts if you want to take all this complexity and routines and handlers out of your scripts and just have an easier way to manage them and to be able to call them globally throughout your scripts you're going to like Libraries.

It all started because you know once I learned how to create a subroutine or handler I started using them and I would put them in my scripts and it worked very well and then I would create another one and then I would put in in some of my scripts and not in some of the other ones and I would update one but I didn't update the other and then I added more routines and then the next thing you know it gets to be this real big jumble that you try to manage. Well we're solving that issue and those problems now in Mavericks with the introduction of AppleScript Libraries.

They are a new plug in architecture for AppleScript that allows you to create powerful collections of handlers and tools yourself and deploy them across your machinery. In addition, they differ from the standard scripting addition that we're used to using all the time in a couple ways. First of all they can be written in AppleScript, you don't have to know C or C ++ in order to create an AppleScript Library.

Because Libraries are loaded by the script, the script is controlling how they use and that will help you avoid terminology conflicts or resource problems, all of that kind of goes away because the script is loading the Library and the Libraries live within the space of the application that's executing the script.

Now AppleScript Libraries have some extra abilities to help you out and the first one that's really important is that they can take advantage of AppleScript objective C. AppleScript objective C exposes the Cocoa classes to AppleScript so things like NS String become available to you and all the methods from that and the instants methods from that now become available for you to use in your AppleScripts scripts and your AppleScript Libraries.

In addition you can also have your libraries publish their own terminology which means instead of you having to remember a specific handler name and a specific order of indicators or data pass throughs or whatever you can actually use English like terms that you create that work for you and have those be the way that you call the AppleScript Library so the handlers within the Library. So it's very powerful and in support of that we've created a couple new constructs, the first is a Script Library reference, a way to easily refer to a Script Library that you have installed on your computer.

You'll see how that differs from the old load Script that we all used to use as a substitute for this. Then finally we've created a new construct that is called the use clause and it's a way to import terminology and to bring in dictionaries and libraries into your script and have them be available globally throughout.

So let's take a look at this, now in the old days before this many of us have tried to use the old script storing techniques that we had available through the scripting addition of load script. Now if you go to your library pallet in the AppleScript editor and you select standard editions and you open up the dictionary window for the standard editions you have nine suites in the dictionary and one of those suites deals with scripting commands and one of those commands is load script and here is the definition for that, let's zoom that in. Now this command was designed for you to be able to point at a specific script file, load its contents into memory and then talk to that script file in memory and have it do things for you.

But there are a couple issues with using this and here's an example script that uses the load script scripting edition. You can see that the first thing is you have to know where the script that you are using as a library exists, where is it, you have to have its exact location and then once you've identified where it is then you perform this load script and store it into a variable that represents the contents of that script.

Then elsewhere in your script you talk to that and you call its handlers or whatever handlers are available within it and have it work but this is a problem because first of all it requires that you know exactly where it is and if it's on a different machine then you have to develop way to locate folders locally, regardless of how drives are named and you have to have error handlers to make sure that they're there and those kind of things and then it requires explicit loading, explicit loading, explicit loading of the targeted script file, you have to do that and it also requires that you address the handlers from within the loaded script file directly and pass through information to them.

This means that there's no custom terminology, you have to remember handler names, you have to remember the order of the various components of the handler and there's no access to the power of AppleScript objective C and the wonderful Cocoa Libraries that are available too on the computer. So there are some issues with using the load script scripting edition and we've addressed a lot of those with our AppleScript Libraries so let's take a look at it.

We're going to start very simply; I always like starting exploring a new concept in the most fundamental ways. So we're going to look at simple AppleScript Libraries, you might never write something this simple yourself but by examining this we're going to learn the principles behind this whole architecture, is that okay, we'll start simple...good.

Specifically we're going to look at a problem that exists all the time of solving the missing command problem, I want to be able to do something but there's no AppleScript command for that. So by examining this little issue we're going to learn how to create and use AppleScript Libraries. Now for our example of a missing command here is the new notes application in Mavericks, I'm going to select some text in there and then right click the selection so it brings up the contextual menu.

Now some of you might know that for a couple system releases now we implemented some new text handling options within the standard text contextual menu and one of them is transformations where you have the option to change the case of selected text to upper case, lower case, capitalize or that's called word case sometimes and you might find it called that as well. But this is a command that's available on the contextual menu but it's not available from within AppleScript itself.

So what I want to do is use this as an example when we're creating our simple library to begin with and we're going to look at being able to convert to upper case transformation, so we'll have something like how, now brown cow in lower case transforms to how now brown cow in upper case, we're going to have a lower case transformation and instead of capitalization I'm just going to call it a word case transformation where the first letter of each word is capitalized and this is what we're going to use as our sample command.

We're going to look at this in two types of simple script libraries, one where the library is written entirely in native AppleScript and two, where the library is written using AppleScript objective C. So just to review here we're going to take this missing command of transformed text and we're going to use that and create two simple libraries to address the fact that's it's not native in AppleScript. We're going to create one in AppleScript, one in AppleScript objective C, let's begin.

An AppleScript script library, so it beings with having a handler some kind of AppleScript handler and here I have one, you'll notice that the name of the handler is change case of text, we'll use this handler throughout here and it has two parameters, one is the source text or the what you want to transform, the text that you want to transform and the second is a case indicator and this case of this handler it's going to a numeric value zero or 1 that indicates whether you want upper or lower case.

It's a simple AppleScript based upon your case indicator, it creates two comparison lists and then iterate through all the characters in the past text and matches whether it's an iteration list and then finally returns the resulting string back to the script itself. Something simple right, now we're going to take this and make this and make this into a library and it's simplest doing the following.

We're just going to take a blank script in the AppleScript editor and we're going to paste the handler into this, we're going to compile it and then just click save and we're going to save it as a script file and you'll notice we named it AppleScript text transform is the name of this little library. Now libraries can contain multiple handlers but for our example they're just going to contain one handler, okay. And we simply name the library and then save it.

Next we install the script library, and the way that you install it is you go to your home library folder and within that library folder you create a new folder called Script Libraries and then you take your newly saved AppleScript file and you drag that into the Script Libraries folders and it becomes part of the AppleScript system on your computer, that's it, it's now installed for you.

So how do you use the AppleScript script library? Now that we've created this simple library with one handler for transforming the case of text here's how you use it. We have a new construct in AppleScript and it's a way to identify easily AppleScript Libraries. So you no longer need to point to a specific file through a file reference like you did with LoadScript and you no longer need to explicitly load the file and all you need to do now is you go into a blank script, you type the word script followed by the name of your library and you notice I left the name extension off, you don't need to have the name extension there.

So script, AppleScript transform and then when I compile this you'll notice that it formats and this is now a AppleScript Library reference, it's a way to point to that library, it was automatically located on your system and it's prepared for use, it's ready to go all you have to do to address it is you can place the verb tell before it or in this case you could enclose it within a tell block and then refer to one of the handlers within that particular library.

So here I have the name of our handler is change case of text, I'm passing into the handler how now brown cow and I have a case indicator of one meaning I want upper case. So I run my script, it automatically gets processed by your AppleScript library and the results are returned back to the script. So that's the basic process of creating a very simple basic AppleScript Library.

So here's the routine that we used, it's a little subroutine now it does convert case of some text from upper to lower and lower to upper but it doesn't handle special characters and it doesn't work with multiple languages. In order to have an AppleScript handler to do all that it might be as long as I am tall or a couple times past that, it would be very complex to do all that in native AppleScript.

So in this case we need to turn to something with a little bit more power and we're going to create our second library example using the power of AppleScript objective C. So this will be a simple library written in AppleScript objective C, everybody with me so far? Not so hard right, okay good.

Okay here's the same handler, this time it's change case of text and it gets two things passed to it, numeric indicator, I mean the source text that we're going to transform and a numeric indicator indicating text. But this time the body of the handler is written in AppleScript objective C and the first thing that the handler does is convert the past into a Cocoa string using NS string method called string with string, then based upon the numeric indicator that's passed through the numeric case indicator it executes a method on that instance, either upper case string, lower case string or capitalized string.

Once that transforms been applied and copied into the variable next to it adjusted string the handler returns the adjusted string back to the script as text by just saying as text in your coercion. So this is the handler that we're going to use in our second example library.

We take a blank script and we paste our handler, the AppleScript objective C handler into our script, we save and in the sheet to save a little bit of time I'm going to save it into the script libraries folder that I already created instead of dragging it in the finder.

You can if you...you can drag if you want to but for our purposes here I'm just going to save it into the newly created script libraries folder. Next I'm going to give it a different name, I'm going to call this one ASOC text transform and ASOC stands for AppleScript objective C.

Finally at the bottom under format instead of the standard script file format we're going to choose to save this as a script bundle and you'll see why in just a moment. So we save our script and then you'll notice once you've saved it in a bundle format at the top menu bar there's a new button that becomes available and what that button does is when you toggle it, it will show you the contents of the script bundle so if I click that a drawer is exposed and this drawer contains a lot of valuable information about this bundle.

First of all it contains the name of the script library, it contains its bundle identifier where you can put your developer domain and name it whatever you like, it contains a short version number, a bundle version number, a copyright string, the terminology file name and a check box indicating whether this library uses AppleScript objective C, a scroll area down at the bottom that will display the contents of your resource folder and a little magic pop up menu that does particular actions with things that you've selected in the resource folder.

So in this particular instance there's only four things that we're interested in. They are...we're going to start by adding the name of our library, ASOC text transform, in the name field, we're going to give it our developer domain identifier so here my company is nighthawk productions dot asoc dot text dot transform and then we're going to give a copyright string and most importantly we're going to check the check box that says this library uses AppleScript objective C. Those are the four things we want to do since we're creating a library that uses AppleScript objective C.

Once we've done that then I can close the drawer, save the script file, now I've already installed this, remember I've saved it into the script libraries folder, if you didn't you can drag it in yourself before doing the next step. Now that I've had this library and it's installed how do you use it, well the same way that you used the earlier library, the first thing you do is you type the word script, followed by the name of the library, in this case it's ASOC text transform, you compile it and you get your AppleScript library reference, identifier so this indicates to me because it's complied that the script has located the library, prepared it for use, it's ready to go, I can encase it within a tell block like I did before, I can refer to the handler within, I can pass text into the handler and my first indicator is the...case indicator is the number zero. So I run it and the result will be all upper case how now brown cow.

Let's iterate that case indicator to the number one, run it again wa-la [phonetic] I have all lower case, let's iterate it again to the number two and I will get word case where the first character of every word is capitalized. So this handler is much better than the earlier handler that was just written in AppleScript, it really has a lot more power and ability because it taps into the power of the Cocoa class NS String to do all the heavy lifting. Now this works by converting to all the case conversions we need, it works with special characters and it works with multiple languages. So this is a very useful one and to demo this I'm going to bring up my friend Chris Page from the AppleScript team, thank you.

Now this is a script that Sal showed you earlier and it has a function that changes the case of some text and just a trivial example of using that and I'm going to run that script and we can see the result down here. We converted this string to upper case.

So just very quickly I'm going to give you the quick run through, this is what happens when you already know how to do this. I'm going to take this function, I'm going to copy it into a new script and I'm going to save it in the script libraries folder and the slowest part of this is giving it a name, I'm going to call it AppleScript change case and we're done, we've now created a library. Now I'm going to run through that a little bit slower for people who are trying to follow along, I'm going to copy this text, create a new script, paste it in and save it.

Now this is...if this is the first time doing this and you don't have the script libraries folder here's a little trick you can press Command Shift G to bring up this sheet that lets you navigate to the libraries folder in your home directory because the library folder is normally hidden from users but as a developer you need to know this to be able to get to that folder. You can also get there in finder.

Then you would use the New Folder button to create that folder and then you could save the script in there and that's it. I'm going to close this and now I'm going to take the client code that uses this library I'm going to copy it out of there and create a new script, I'm going to close this one so it's out of our way and paste the code in.

Now I'm going to show you how to use the library if you were following along earlier, this might look very familiar, I'm going to say tell script AppleScript, change case and I'm going to compile it and you can see that it works. I manage not to misspell the library name.

If I had just to show you, if I put an x into the name which means it's not going to be found, when we try to compile it we get an error that says that it couldn't find that script so you'll know early on during script development whether you've referred to a library correctly and when I run it we get the same result, how now brown cow is in upper case. That is the simplest case of using the script library just to reuse a function you've been using in your scripts up till now.

Now we want to take advantage of AppleScript objective C to do more than we can do with AppleScript, if I take this string and introduce some accented characters and run you can see down here in the results that the accented o's did not get converted to upper case.

That's because AppleScript doesn't have native support for doing case changes and it doesn't...you would have to write a very extensive script to handle all the characters in Unicode but the foundation framework that's part of Cocoa has in a string class that has a rich variety of text manipulation functions, several interesting ones for changing case. So we're going to take advantage of that in an AppleScript objective C version of the library that we already created.

I'm going to create a new script and save it in script libraries folder again, this time I'm going to name it ASOC change case. ASOC is a short hand we sometimes use for AppleScript objective C and as Sal mentioned I'll need to save it as a script bundle but that's a pretty easy thing to do.

I'm going to open the bundle drawer and update...well the simplest thing that I have to do here is enable AppleScript objective C library, that makes ASOC available when this code is running and while I'm here I'm going to fill out these other fields. These fields set values inside of the info P list file inside the bundle, there's a lot of documentation about how do that and how the various fields work if you're unfamiliar with them and I'm going to fill in a couple pieces of information, I've got my...the name, ASOC change case and I'm going to put my bundle identifier in here which I mistyped...let me try it again.

Okay the version number default is 1.0, we highly recommend that you take advantage of version numbers because when you start distributing and reusing and updating libraries you can use it to distinguish which version you're talking about. I'm going to show you later there's a way for you to have your script check the version to make sure that it's new enough for your client script and I'll put a copyright notice in here.

But again all we really need to do was click this check box, let me put that script aside for a moment and now I'm going to put in the AppleScript version of our library code. This is essentially the same function, we haven't changed that we're just changing the implementation, like Sal mentioned earlier we construct an NS String from our AppleScript string, we call the appropriate method of NS String to do the capitalization we want and then we return it and convert it back to an AppleScript string.

All right so that's it we've created an AppleScript objective C version of the library and now let's use it. I'm going to go back to my client script and I'm just going to change the name to match our new library and I'm going to run it and this time you can see in the result pane that all the accented o's have been converted to upper case.

Furthermore we now have a third options because the NS String class has a method for doing capitalization, it capitalizes every word in your string, we can put a different value in here and run it and so now we've extended...now we get the word capitalized version of the string.

So you can see that using AppleScript objective C we can go beyond what we can do in AppleScript and we can replace large chunks of AppleScript that might have had to do a lot of their own work with existing framework functions that are available on the system to every other application. Now you can use them in libraries which means you can use them in your scripts and script applets.

Just briefly I want to mention that when we look up libraries we search in a number of locations, Sal will mention those later and we start by looking in the current applications bundle which means that you can conveniently distribute an applet that contains libraries that you want to bundle with it and the user can just make that...put that application on the machine and run it without having to install libraries anywhere before use.

Okay thank you.

So you can see that it's not just magic on a slide you can actually do this stuff live, right, and so we were looking at the example that Chris had there and if we look at the syntax that was involved here, we have tell the script library identifier to call this method, now the short coming in this whole process or the got cha in all this process is that if you have a lot of libraries or you have complex libraries, you have to remember the names of all these different handlers and you have to remember what parameters are passed through.

It would be so much nicer if I could just...instead of saying change case of text like that, if I could just use some words I could remember like transform text and then give it the text as a direct parameter to and then use some word like upper case instead of a number or lower case or word case, I really want to be able to say this because I can remember this, remembering the names of 150 or 200 different handlers that's really a pain, I want to be able to use this kind of terminology. So this is what we want to do as we examine the next thing of creating libraries with terminology.

Step one is you start with the dictionary. So here is an example dictionary of a script library, it's not a really complex one but it's quite functional, it has one suite in it, it's called AppleScript text utilities, there's two commands in the suite, one is for transforming text, the other is for replacing strings in text. You can see the definition for the suite and the definition for each one of the particular commands.

This is actually a file; scripting dictionaries are actually files that get displayed within the AppleScript editor application. These scripting dictionary files are called sdefs which stands for scripting dictionary and they are placed inside of the bundle of your AppleScript library so for the first time ever today we're going to look at how to create an sdef or a scripting definition file or just call the scripting dictionary.

Now these are XML based documents, they have a name extension of .sdef and they define the various scripting elements that are part of your library. For example a suite or a command that might have parameters and it might also use enumerations in the command as well. In addition you can include documentation in your scripting dictionary so that your customer or you can actually see an example script that uses the terminology.

So let's look at how this is done. This is a scripting dictionary file, this is an sdef. It's an empty sdef but it is a fully formed empty sdef and you can edit this with you know any of the great applications we have out there that can edit XML documents.

We're going to use this when we define our terminology for an AppleScript dictionary. The first line is an XML declaration, it's a standard declaration used by every XML file. Next becomes a reference to the DTD or document type declaration. This is just boiler plate stuff, it points to a folder in your system folder that contains the master sdef file that tells the system how an sdef file is supposed to be read.

Then finally there's a pairing of tags for dictionary, it's an open and close tag for dictionary and we're going to use this as our template for creating a dictionary that works with this command, transform text how now brown cow to upper case. So I'm just going to leave that on the bottom of the screen as we do this so we can keep in mind how this works. Are you ready to go...here we go, so the first thing I'm going to do is insert within the dictionary tags a new set of tags called suite, I'm going to create a script suite.

The opening tag to the script suite has a couple parameters, one is the name, I'm going to call it text utilities and a description, I can give a description and then a four character code, Apple reserves the use of four character codes that are all lower case. So those are used by Apple applications like definder to define their objects, you're welcome to use any combination of upper case and lower case letters that you want that work for you, in this case I have four upper case letters that I'm using for the four character code for my suite.

Next I'm going to open up this suite and I'm going to insert a command, I want to put a command in my script suite and the opening tag of the command tag pairing has a couple of attributes. The first is the name, that's the name of the command in this case it's transform text, so I want that to be the name of the command, that's what I'm going to remember in my brain when I write my scripts and it gets and 8 character code, commands are the only thing that gets this 8 character code and the reason it does is because the first four characters are usually the code of the suite that the command belongs to followed by an additional four characters so that's what I did here.

Next we're going to open up the command pairing and we're going to insert a direct parameter tag. Now the direct parameter is the object that we're addressing in this case the text. So it has a couple of attributes in this tag, the first is the kind of data, in this case type is text and then the description, the text to transform. There's no code necessary because this is the direct parameter of my command.

Once I've done that now I can continue defining my...the scope of my command by addressing the second parameter here, so I insert a parameter tag in my command pairing and this one gets the name of two, it gets a four character code and under type I have case conversion.

Now case conversion is not a data type or anything in particular it happens to be the name of the set of enumerations that I'm going to be using, I'm going to create another, another pairing later in my sdef that will hold the enumerations like upper case, lower case, word case so for right now I'm just going to type in case conversion and then that's it. That's my basic command tag right there.

After that I'll insert a pairing for enumeration and this is where I will list the various enumerators like upper case, word case, it gets a couple of attributes, the most important being its name has to match the type that you just called in the previous command so the type for the parameter in the command has to match the name of the set of enumerations that we're going to use and it also gets its own four character code.

Once I've created the enumeration set I can insert my first enumerator, it gets a couple of parameters, it's name is going to be upper case, it's gets a four character code and then we can insert the other two enumerators, lower case, word case, each with its own four character code.

That's the sdef that will define the use of this command, that's a fully formed and correct scripting definition file for having a single suite with a single command that is transform text direct parameter to enumerator upper case, lower case, word case. This is what it looks like, if you saved this you could just stop there but you can do a little bit of extra and I suggest that you make that effort.

We're going to insert in the command pairing a documentation tag, an open and closing documentation tag and this allows you to put information in there about the command so you can help somebody out who's reading your dictionary, you can tell them hey this command is used usually for this, this is how you say it and you'll notice that I've included a pair of 8 opening and closing HTML tags in there and that's because the dictionary viewer in the AppleScript editor used HTML to display the formatting and the color of the information in its window.

So that means that I can then take some HTML and put it into my documentation. What I like to do myself is always have an example script of how to call the command. That's what I did here, I have an example that says transform text how now brown cow to upper case. So no matter what when the user looks at the dictionary for my library they can see oh this is how you use it, okay I got it.

Now when this is all displayed within the AppleScript editor application it will look something like this, you'll have your suite definition here then you'll have the definition of your command and how it's called and then my documentation so this is all documentation, I apply text transformation, for example change the case of targeted text to upper case and then I have a sample script that the user can see and I show them what the result typically would be. So it's worth it to add that little bit of extra in your scripting definition file when you create it.

Now that we've done that we save that file, we give it the name that we had for it, AppleScript text utilities and we just put it aside. Next step is we create a script bundle, very easy, you go to AppleScript editor, you open up a new file, you go save and in the drop down sheet under file format you choose script bundle as the format that you want to use and then up at the top you give it a name, I'm going to call this AppleScript text utilities and you save it.

Once it's been saved we get the access to the bundled drawer, we open that up and then again here is the panel with all the various options for us. The script name, the bundle identifier, the short version number, the bundle version number, the copyright string, the name of the sdef file, whether we're using AppleScript objective C, the contents of the resources folder and the little action menu that you can do things in the resources folder.

So in this case we're going to move the window to the side a little bit and we're going to actually take that file and drag it into the resources folder area here and let it go. This will copy that sdef file into the script bundle for us and you can see now it has become part of a list that's available.

Then I can fill out the information up there by checking the check box that my using AppleScript objective C and most importantly put the name of the scripting definition file, the title of it, in that field, you can leaved off the .sdef then you simply save your script bundle, close the drawer and then save it.

Next we add the code to the script bundle, so we have our AppleScript Library bundle and we've been using this one handler over and over again in Chris' examples and in what I've been showing you. But when you have a terminology your handler has to match the terminology so you here we have an AppleScript handler, you can tell because it begins with on and ends with in right but the handler syntax has to match the terminology that I defined in my dictionary so I begin with my command, transform text.

Next I need something to represent my direct parameter so I have a variable here called source text, it's going to represent whatever text is getting passed to my handler, then my secondary parameter two and then another variable called case indicator that's going to represent one of the enumerations that I created, upper case, lower case word case.

Let's take a look at how this works again it takes the source string, converts it to a Cocoa string using NS String's string method, string with string and then based upon a comparison between what you pass into that handler for an enumerator versus one of the other options it applies and instance method wither upper case string, lower case string and then finally we convert everything back to just plain AppleScript text by saying as text and we're done.

So this is the handler that we're going to use, we take our bundle we paste it into it, we save it, next we install it in case you didn't save it into the AppleScript Libraries folder, script libraries folder just take the file, make a script libraries folder in your home library directory and drag that script file in there and that's it, it is now installed and now we can call it so next step using the library.

So again we can just target the library with an AppleScript Library identifier script and then the name of the library and we can encase that within a tell statement but this time instead of calling the name of the handler I can just use my terminology, transform text, here it is to upper case and when this runs it runs fine just like the other handlers worked, it works perfectly.

So here's an example of using that library in a script for the finder, so this particular script will change the case of selected folders in the finder so if I have some folders selected and I want their names to be upper case this is the script that will do that. You can see that it runs and the case changes.

Now I'll walk you through it real quick, you get the selected items that are selected and you iterate through each one then we call our script library, right here and then we apply the results of the transformation to the name and then end our repeat. So here's our tell block, now there's a problem with this tell block, if I'm only using it once that's not bad but if I have a script that has to use this all the time it's a pain and in addition we have this thing going on with variable where I have to create a variable to get the results of the transformation that I can then use later on in the script because it's outside of the tell block.

I want all of that to go away and we fix that issue with a new construct that we've created called the use clause, so at the top of my script I enter the word use and then my script library identifier and what that does is dynamically load my library into memory making it globally available throughout this script, so I no longer need this tell block addressing my library and as a matter of fact once I got rid of that I can get rid of the nonsense with the variables back and forth and put everything on one line so that the finder will talk to this command transparently and it all becomes one single statement.

So we go from this to that with the use clause, which is a way to load and import terminology into your script, this is what we like. Here's what it looks like in an actual script window, now with the use clause and then taking out the back and forth with the variable.

That's exactly what we like, it's easy to remember, it's powerful to use, it's clean and it's a smooth syntax. Now when you deploy libraries, once you've created something like this you can put it in multiple locations, the one that we've been talking about is your home library folder and in addition you can go to the top level on your computer and you can place it in a script libraries folder within that library folder.

If you have a script bundle or a script application you within its resources folder you can create a script libraries folder and place it in there. So you can pass...give someone a AppleScript droplet or AppleScript applet that contains script libraries that it can draw from, in addition any application that's using calling AppleScript you can create in its resources folder a script library folder.

So AppleScript Libraries are a new plug-in architecture enabling quick development and access to your favorite sets of handlers. It's different from scripting additions because you can write them yourself in AppleScript and they're controlled by the script that loads them. They can use AppleScript objective C to access all the wonderment of Cocoa and they can also publish their own scripting terminology.

In support of them we created two new constructs the script library identifier, that finds the library for you and loads and we also created a new use clause that allows you to load the library for global access. So for more information you can contact these poor guys or watch the video from the earlier session on automation over view. One more thing, this is a very important day for us because 20 years ago AppleScript was given to the world.

In 1993 AppleScript released to the...I mean Apple released AppleScript to the public and since then it's become a phenomenal language that people and companies rely upon to automate the processes that they do, they build their businesses on it, they build their careers on it and we want to take this opportunity on the 20th anniversary to say thank you to all of the developers that made their apps scriptable, we want to say thank you to all the scriptors who wrote and write scripts everyday and share them with others. We want to thank our customers for using AppleScript and in addition we want to thank all of the engineers that worked on scriptable applications and worked at Apple in creating this. We really appreciate it, thank you so much.