Does anyone use AppleScript on macOS?
I heavily utilize ChatGPT to generate .ics files to populate my Apple Calendar with various events, but I have been wanting to upgrade my time management and also use the Reminders app.
I recently used ChatGPT to help me populate a Trello board with tasks associated with a project I am working on, but I was getting annoyed with having my workflow split across Apple Calendar and Trello. I exported my Trello board as a CSV and was trying to have ChatGPT turn it into a file I could import into Reminders, but as it turns out, this is not easy.
.ics files do contain syntax for reminders tasks with due dates that populate the Apple Calendar, but generating an .ics file with only reminders tasks and importing into Calendar doesn’t actually work. Calendar recognizes that the .ics contains Reminders tasks and opens Reminders to import the tasks, but Reminders returns an error because it doesn’t support import, it only supports export to Calendar.
I found that Reminders has a Reminders.scpt dictionary file within the .app package that details .applescript commands that can create new tasks, so I fell into the world of AppleScript. The issue with AppleScript is that it was created in the 80s and hasn’t been updated since 2013. It has no native CSV support and is pretty clunky.
AppleScript does have text file support, so I was able to have ChatGPT convert my CSV into a .txt that I could parse with AppleScript. This allowed me to automate the creation of tasks in the Reminders app from my Trello CSV, but it was annoying and I still feel like there must be a better way.
Does anyone here use AppleScript regularly and know its full capabilities?
Also, are there any good resources out there for learning more about AppleScript? The Apple documentation is very out of date and it seems like more of a legacy language than something Apple regularly maintains.
Apple's OSA also supports JavaScript if you'd like something a little more familiar. AppleScript is nifty but that's the route I usually take when I have less-trivial things to automate. You get even less documentation though.
Also often overlooked is Apple's Shortcuts app.
I totally forgot about Shortcuts! I was trying to use Automator at first, but it was very clunky, so I went straight to AppleScript. Shortcuts looks like Automator, but actually usable.
It’s very strange for Apple to have two versions of visual scripting on macOS at the same time. They don’t usually leave legacy software lying around.
Shortcuts really is something special, I actually have a ton of thoughts about it. Like, how, in the year of our lord 2025, is there not an Apple Intelligence Siri with ridiculous amounts of freedom to interact with your device? With LLMs, we could reasonably have a Siri where you can ask, "Hey, can you add the currently playing song to my work out playlist?" and it could stitch together Shortcut blocks to Get Current Song, and Add To Playlist.
And that's a very basic example. It also seems reasonable to be able to share a document to Siri, ask it to extract the first two pages into a new document and save it to a folder in your notes, and if you perform that action multiple times, it could offer to create a dedicated shortcut for that action to bypass Siri entirely next time. It'd also make it an incredibly powerful on-ramp to people taking more control over their phones and experimenting with Shortcuts on their own.
It's just me and my thoughts over here, so maybe I'm overlooking something obvious, but that seems like an actually decent use case for LLMs, and yet there's no movement towards it.
There must be something to it because I had the exact same idea. The way I am using ChatGPT and AppleScript separately could be an easy agentic AI feature.
I’m already talking to an LLM to help me generate a todo list based on goals I’m communicating to it. Would it be such a stretch to have it generate a todo list in a specific manner that an AppleScript can parse and use to generate reminders?
I always thought the big hurdle with agentic Siri on Apple devices was due to apps all operating in their own containers and limited APIs for inter-app communication, but Apple already solved this back in the 90s.
What’s even more surprising to me is that 3rd party developers haven’t created an agentic do-it-all AI that at least runs on MacOS.
The one thing that may hint at why Apple has been fumbling with Siri is something I learned about the internal structure at Apple from an employee. Apple is so focused on preventing leaks that their NDAs prevent internal discussions between teams about ongoing projects. Even the QA people don’t know exactly what they are testing; They will run a prototype through a set of tests and hand the results back to the team that built the prototype. The QA people don’t know what has changed inside what they are testing, they only know what they input and what they receive back. They even run privacy screen protectors on their computers so that coworkers sitting next to them can’t see what they are doing. Integration is the focus of only a select few teams who only work on making all the modules fit together properly.
The teams working on Siri probably run into lots of obstacles trying to figure out how to get Siri to operate agentically when they don’t even know what is going on inside any of the modules making up Apple devices and software. It’s up to the individual teams to create the necessary APIs to give Siri the access it needs, but I somehow doubt there is much guidance on what APIs they need to build.
All of these internal obstacles make it very difficult for an all encompassing agentic Siri to be built for Apple devices, not to mention makes the progress very slow as information does not travel fast between teams.
Frankly I didn’t know that AppleScript is still a thing. I just assumed it died with MacOS Classic.
I’m kind of surprised that it’s still around. It must be foundational to macOS in some way since it was created in the 90s.
What really surprised me is that Automator and Shortcuts exist in macOS at the same time. Automator just seems to be an old clunky version of Shortcuts and Apple doesn’t usually leave legacy software lying around when they have new software that fills the same role.
either of these of any value?
You can use this method of seeing what commands are supported for a given app https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/46521/how-do-i-find-out-the-applescript-commands-available-for-a-particular-app