rubyosa19: OSX scripting in Ruby instead of AppleScript¶ ↑

This is a modernization of the glorious but unmaintained rubyosa gem, aimed at making it compatible with ruby 1.9.x series. At the moment, it successfully compiles on OS X Lion and Mountain Lion.

rubyosa lets you use Ruby instead of AppleScript when writing scripts for OSX. For example:

require 'rubyosa'

iTunes = OSA.app('iTunes')
puts iTunes.current_track.name
iTunes.sound_volume = 50
iTunes.play

You can also interactively use rubyosa from IRB, which can be a convenient way to explore the available properties:

$ irb
001 > require 'rubyosa'
 => true
002 > iTunes = OSA.app('iTunes')
 => <OSA::ITunes::Application:0x007fb9a30d0a98 desc="'sign'(366B6F6F6836)">
003 > iTunes.cur      # ... then press TAB to show this:
iTunes.current_encoder       iTunes.current_encoder=      iTunes.current_eq_preset
iTunes.current_eq_preset=    iTunes.current_playlist      iTunes.current_stream_title
iTunes.current_stream_url    iTunes.current_track         iTunes.current_visual
iTunes.current_visual=

Apple has some documentation for rubyosa in their guide, Ruby and Python Programming Topics for OS X.

• Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn’t been implemented or the bug hasn’t been fixed yet.

• Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn’t requested it and/or contributed it.

• Fork the project.

• Start a feature/bugfix branch.

• Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution.

• Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.

• Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.

Copyright © 2012 Paolo Bosetti. See LICENSE.txt for further details.