Mac Geekery

AppleScript is terribly under-used on my computer, so I poked around a little after the last tip and thought about what I could do. I thought about using Scripts in the Script Menu along with my favorite OS feature: assigning arbitrary keyboard shortcuts to menu items. Together, it appeared that they could accomplish much, yes, but what to try?

Well, I love how you can set the rating of a group of photos in iPhoto to five stars with ⌘⌥5, and have always wanted the same for iTunes. So, I tried it.

I started by making an Automator action as follows:

• Get selected iTunes items
• Run AppleScript
  

  on run {input, parameters}
  	repeat with theTrack in input
  		try
  			tell application "iTunes"
  				set the rating of theTrack to 20
  			end tell
  		end try
  	end repeat
  end run
  

I saved it as a Workflow document in Library/Scripts/Applications/iTunes as “Rate as 1” and then made the others with the appropriate values (iTunes uses 1-100 internally, every 20 being a star, so 1 is 20, 2 is 40, etc.) and named them “Rate as 2” and so on up to five.

I then headed over to System Preferences, into Keyboard and Mouse, then to Keyboard Shortcuts. I added an item to set any menu that is called “Rate as 1” to use ⌘⌥1 as the shortcut. After restarting SystemUIServer by forcing it to quit in Activity Monitor, it showed in the Script Menu menu with the proper shortcut (yay!), but no manner of program or system restarts would make it actually activate with the keyboard (boo!).

Lesson number one: Script Menu is not in the responder chain for keyboard events. No matter what you set, it won’t take a keyboard command unless you’ve clicked on the menu itself. Even then, if your shortcut involves the option key you’ll trigger the “open the original script” feature rather than executing it.

So, Script Menu is out. Psyche.

I then looked around and learned of iTunes’ script menu. I dropped the Workflows into Library/iTunes/Scripts (I had to make it) and nothing happened. Okay, it wants AppleScripts, the little bastard (boo!). So I opened up Script Editor and turned the above into a little script:

tell application "iTunes"
	repeat with theTrack in (get selection)
		set the rating of theTrack to 20
	end repeat
end tell

I saved this into that Library/iTunes/Scripts folder with the same naming scheme as before and then it instantly showed up in a new iTunes script menu with the proper keyboard shortcut (because I’d said “All Applications” earlier in System Preferences). Then I made the other scripts for the other ratings and it all worked like a charm.

Lesson learned: While you can add anything to the Script Menu, and even give them shortcuts, they won’t work on those shortcuts because SystemUIServer is not a part of the responder chain. Major suck. However, you can add just about anything you would occasionally use in there, so get busy scripting. If you want it to respond to a keystroke, you get to use AppleScript proper and save it in an application-specific folder, presuming that application supports it.

To get you started with iTunes AppleScripting, a fellow named Doug appears to have a head start on me with some pretty simple, but useful, ideas.

Yes, I’m aware that there are a myriad of programs that let me assign keystrokes to applications and scripts. This, however, is not an article about them. This is about what Mac OS X lets you do.