I’m greatly saddened to hear the news, but I can understand the reasoning behind the decision. The writing is on the wall for AppleScript & automation in general on the Mac. Script Debugger’s EOL is an absolutely devastating loss for AppleScripters everywhere.
Thank you both for all your contributions & support over the years! Wish you the best with your future endeavours.
Well hell, I was just getting comfortable. It’s like the really good in life always leaves too soon.
Thank you for all you’ve contributed in the short time we’ve been together and not taking it all with you. 
Thank you guys for all the work you have done. Thank you also for the end-of-product calendar; this is really nice to do. I wish you both great things going forward.
The journey in life and the experience from the past could set the path to imagination what we could do in the future. The hard part is not to do what we have learn its to do things nobody else have done. That was my feeling when I decided to stop using AppleScript and leaving MacScripter.net. I like to thank Mark for his effort to running the only forums that still are dedicated to AppleScript or Scripting on macOS platform for all years. I like to thank again Shane Stanley for his kindness and effort to share his knowledge in AppleScriptObjC. It become a easy path to learn how Objective-C framework was working it also set the path to do the same things in PyObjC. I do not think I would have read Apple’s API so much I have done without AppleScript that started it all for me.
I was not directly a Script Debugger user, I like to do it that hard way (no shortcuts) 
but I understand that many people use it when they need something better to debug the code.
Mark and Shane have a great journey to fill yours imagination.
Happy New Year 2025
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
ScriptDebugger is the primary reason I continue to use AppleScript for automation projects. Such a great development environment—but that is only half the story. Mark provided such excellent support for so many years. That was/is what is so great about small developers. The ideal.
With Shane’s help he continued to do this for years—a model for everyone. I also want forget my correspondence with Gerry, contributions from Matt, and others. Thanks so much for making my life easier for so many years. I’m sure I will still be using SD into the next decade.
I’m so sorry to hear this news, but so grateful to Mark and Shane, as well as Ray and many others who have helped me so much over the years. I shudder to think about trying to develop any script with any complexity without the use of Script Debugger. Thankfully, I am now also retired, so any scripting I do is mostly for my own enjoyment!
Sorry to read this news!
When I decided yesterday to finally learn AS enough to accomplish relatively simple publishing and design tasks in InDesign and Illustrator, I didn’t know of this announcement!
My decision was made because I need to place dozens of multipage-PDF files into an InDesign document and do some resizing and repositioning and object styling to each PDF page image.
I could do it the laborious way and be finished in a day, but the idea of doing it this way is painful to me when I know this is a trivial task for an AS routine or set of routines. Given Adobe InDesign provides a start with the Multipage PDF import script I thought I have to try (hours later I’m wondering why I fooled myself again to think this would be easy).
Given JS is a language I loath and the sample code from Adobe is verbose when c.f. their AS code I’m choosing AS… and also b/c this excellent tool in SD exists. Beats figurine out Visual Code Studio and JS the thousands of idiosyncrasies for scripting macOS apps.
I didn’t realise Script Debugger was retiring from a marathon innings and setting an MCG-record-score (cricket jargon for those not from Melbourne or the Commonwealth nations — they all play cricket a lot) when I made this decision to finally pony up and learn enough AS to be almost dangerous. Why do I keep choosing “dead” coding languages?* — I was never interested in Latin or Classical Greek!
Hopefully this community will get me over the humps b/c sure as sh!t ChatGTP is worse at writing AS (and JS for macOS application scripting) than I am, I just subscripted to a paid plan because a free ChatGTP session is never long enough to get the bugs out of its terribly randomly generated code. I have to coach it extensively. Now I’ll be patient and ask questions here, even if it makes me look dumb as all heck 
Thanks to Mark, Shane (a fellow Melbournian!) and others, for all the effort that went into making the Script Debugger tool and community. I’ve used the trial version more a few times over the decades to do little bit of macOS/DTP tasks — more on that in my profile but I had to cut it short to fit in the 3,000 character cap
SD is a really sweet tool which is partly why I decided to bit the bullet and try to learn enough AS to be almost a bit dangerous!
Mark and Shane,
I can’t say how much your commitment has helped me.
Thanking you a thousand times is not enough.
Be happy and healthy!
I freely admit I cried a little when I read this.
I’ve been a user^H^H^H^H fan since, I think '97? '98? Certainly I remember using it when I lived in New Orleans, and I left there in '99. It literally got me my first paid gig as any kind of software developer when I wrote a tool for the moderators at TalkCity (born out of the ashes of eWorld) and my script (or maybe a lack of efficient programming skills on my part) exceeded Script Editor’s 32k character limit. SD to the rescue!
Man, I remember having to keep shortening my variables’ names to get them to compile in Script Editor.
At one point, right before enlightenment, I kept my master script in BBEdit and had another script do a series of find-and-replace actions to reduce the footprint to something that SE would compile. Fun times!
SD’s unlimited script size feature alone was worth it for me, let alone all the other good things that came with it at the time, and ever since.
But enough people here know all of SD’s goodness. I’m sure we all have our stories and memories.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. Thanks, Mark. A million times, thanks!
This is sad news.
As others on this thread, I’d like to mention how greatly the efforts of Shane, Mark, and everyone else involved in SD, are appreciated.
To me, SD was basically an upgrade of Shane’s amazing AppleScriptObjC Explorer (which I started using when Apple killed the AppleScript editor in Xcode).
The thought of SD stopping working on a newer version of macOS sends chills down my spine.
I think our duty now is to bombard Apple with feature requests for their own Script Editor.
My two topmost requests would be:
-Code completion
-Apply color to method and handler names
There are probably a few other equally important that I don’t even notice as I’m taking them for granted in SD.
I think it’s the opposite — I’m seeing more public interest in AppleScript these days because people are seeing that it’s the only automation tool that actually works! I think everyone wants a no code solution and drag and drop blocks, but they cannot deliver what AppleScript does.
It’s been one hell of a great run! Thanks @alldritt !!!
I remember using it on system 7 and 9. Was lost for a while and came back. Just this past weekend, I solved a Microsoft Word conundrum that was only possible thanks to script debugger! I can think of many other projects over the years that were undoable until I got script debugger out and really looked at what the app was doing (or not doing)
I shudder to think of a day without script debugger because I sometimes I cannot figure out how to specify objects and properties in various apps without using it and verifying with explorer.
Nevertheless, I know many many projects I’d never have been able to make had I not had script debugger!
I wish there was a way we could help you guys keep it going. But for now I will always speak well of script debugger because it has been that one tool that made it all just work! Thank you!
Jeez, really?! Crap!!! I’m very sad about this. You’ve built a great product for decades. I don’t know what I’ll use after it stops working in the unforeseeable future when Apple makes some stupid change that causes it to no longer work (like they so often do). No other 3rd party software has been nearly as useful and powerful, not since the days of CodeWarrior when there was no Apple equivalent.
Damn it.
You can’t just keep it going on an amateur level (getting another job and working on it in spare time) and selling it on the Mac App Store instead of messing with your own licensing and all that?
FWIW, when we looked at that some time ago, it was pretty obvious we’d have to disable too much to get it into the store. The licensing part is a very small part of the puzzle.
Ah, that’s too bad. One can dream that Apple would be able to allow such a hallowed and irreplaceable development app certain latitudes and security allowances, especially since you’re “family”. I’d make an offer to buy it, but I’m not sure if my other half would appreciate spending a big chunk of our retirement money at this point.