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OK, they aren't really my first AppleScripts. I used AppleScript a lot back in the Mac OS 7 days, but unfortunately most of the applications I used back then didn't support it very well. I was hoping things would be better now, but they really aren't. Apple's applications have reasonable support, but many third parties' applications do not.

Case in point: Mozilla Firefox 1.0. Released this week, I read several Mac users' comments that we finally have a good browser for Mac OS. On Windows, I prefer Firefox to IE, but on Mac, it is not as good as OmniWeb, and is not better than Safari. What really bugs me about Firefox is the lack of support for basic Mac features, especially AppleScript.

But anyway, I found a need for a simple AppleScript today. I use Shrook as my RSS reader. Shrook is nice, but is still not very polished. I was trying to download Adam Curry's Daily Source Code MP3 from the Shrook window, but the "Download Linked File" item on the context menu had no effect. So I opened the page in OmniWeb, but OmniWeb wanted to download the whole file and then play it in an ugly embedded QuickTime viewer. What I really wanted to do was get iTunes to stream it, but didn't want to go through all the hoo-hah of opening the URL in iTunes.

I haven't used AppleScript for years, so I spent a long while looking at various examples on the web and experimenting with different concepts. I finally came up with a script that would let me copy the MP3 URL to the clipboard, and then select "Open Clipboard Location in iTunes" from my Script Menu. Here's the script, which I saved as "Open Clipboard Location in iTunes.scpt" in ~/Library/Scripts:

tell application "iTunes"
    set theLocation to (the clipboard as text)
    open location theLocation
end tell

Very simple, like it should be.

After that little exercise, I decided I'd like a similar script that would open a URL from the clipboard in a new tab in OmniWeb. OmniWeb has the richest AppleScript support of all the Mac browsers I've seen. Here's the script:

tell application "OmniWeb"
    activate
    if (count browsers) < 1 then
        make new browser at front of browsers
    end if
    set theUrl to (the clipboard as text)
    tell front browser
        set theNewTab to (make new tab at end of tabs with properties {address:theUrl})
        set active tab to theNewTab
    end tell
end tell