About ApplescriptToDictionaryWithNuToo

"ApplescriptToDictionaryWithNuToo" is an unfortunately long name but it is kind of descriptive. I ran into a problem when developing Paperclip in which I couldn't receive a dictionary via applescript. Now, there are some ways around this, such as defining a dictionary schema, that's all well documented. Unfortunately, none of them were flexible in any way. I just wanted to convert an applescript record into an NSDictionary. I wasn't too particularly worried about the user passing in incompatible types, I just needed a way to catch the basic objects.

To that end, I wrote NSAppleEventDescriptor+FCSAdditions.[hm]. This lets me call -toObject on an NSAppleEventDescriptor to turn it into a basic Cocoa object. I found it both useful and convenient so I decided to release it.

I wrote that category specifically so I could include an applescript interface to a Nu parser for Paperclip. I figured that since I wrote NSAppleEventDescriptor+FCSAdditions.[hm] for this purpose, I'd go ahead and use it to demonstrate its use.

About the code

The code is not document in any meaningful way. Controller.m shows a very basic Nu parser built on top of Objective-C. NSApplication+Applescript.[hm] is part of the app's interface with applescript. It basically intercepts a perform nu message and runs it through a simple interpreter.

Note that I'm including the Nu framework with this release. It's being link to in the .xcodeproj files but there is also a special build phase. The Nu framework as included is linked for use in one of the standard framework locations (/Library/Frameworks/ by default). The special build phase re-links it for use in a distributable application.

Contact information

Grayson Hansard
From Concentrate Software