Skip the AppleScript with Ruby

For a long time now I have been working on learning AppleScript, where "working on" means I bought an AppleScript book that sits on my table accusingly, but I've never actually picked it up and read through it. AppleScript is clearly a powerful and relatively easy way to get somewhat complex tasks accomplished on your Mac; heck with AppleScript Studio you can even write stand-alone applications of a sort. This story on MacDevCenter, however, has given me pause. AppleScript guru Matt Neuburg (who literally wrote, if not the, at least a book on AppleScript) has put up a nice tutorial on replacing AppleScript with rb-appscript, which is "a high-level, user-friendly Apple event bridge that allows you to control scriptable Mac OS X applications using ordinary Ruby scripts." Now everybody and his brother has been going on of late about how wonderful Ruby is for web development, particularly with Rails using TextMate, so now I have a dilemma. Should I actually try to learn Ruby instead and double my return, as it were? While I think that over, go check out Matt's tutorial and see for yourself how Ruby and Apple events can make beautiful music together.

[Via MacVolPlace]