Hi,
I wish to write a utility application that will enable me to edit the IPTC metadata that is associated with digital image files. The actual reading and writing of the data to the files will be conducted by Phil Harvey’s excellent command line tool “exiftool” meaning that all I need to create is a user interface with some lightweight processing of strings under the hood.
In the past I would have used RunRev’s Livecode to create this front end. Unfortunately RunRev have changed their licensing terms with the result that Livecode is no longer an option for me. I could use OpenXtalk but I now have a M2 mac and OpenXtalk and any applications built with it require Rosetta to run and at some point Apple will pull the plug on Rosetta. This is all rather unfortunate given that I have used Livecode for the past 14 years.
During the past years I have dabbled in simple Applescripts but I have no experience with the more advanced forms such as AppleScriptObjC. My project requires a simple graphical interface and I am not sure if it is possible to create one for an Applescript application. I have searched for information but much of what is found is quite old and out of date,
I may get away with using Shane’s excellent “Dialog Toolkit Plus” Library but I wonder if there is a better method of creating a user interface. Perhaps I’m asking to much of Applescript and should be looking elsewhere such as Swift or Python. I’d appreciate your advice.
This. There are plenty of example scripts with the package and several posted on the forums here. It also works really well with Shane’s Myriad Tables.
Simon. Shane’s Dialog Toolkit Plus library works great. You may also want to look at the open-source swiftDialog app (here). I’ve included some simple examples in the MacScripter site (here).
I once was faced with the same thing. My requirements started to expand past simple dialogues and involved using tableViews, and then the selection of a table view to show me more detail based on that selection.
If you’re up for it. (I’m glad I did as it helped further my coding and learn more about working with X-Code and objective-c.
It’s a small bit of learning curve but there are plenty of examples available out there that you can use as templates.
So I recommend getting into XCode and using its interface builder. You can set a lot of things up by using the graphical interface and connecting them together via IBOutlets and Actions. and do most of it without programming any code.
Thanks for your message and encouragement. I have downloaded X-Code but have not tried to use it, yet! I know I should especially as I did a little coding when I wrote a library for livecode that reads calendar data. This is written in Livecode builder but has to make multiple calls using objective-c so it is not completely new to me.