I don't know exactly why I started doing this tutorial on AppleScript, but I've wanted to do something along these lines for as long as I've had a computer. I found out about this tutorial reading one of the social sites like Engadget or Digg, and decided to check it out. Now, I'm sorta glad I did. It's probably gonna be as close as I get to doing some programming-like stuff. I've already learned a little bit more about how to get this computer to do what I want it to the way I want it to do it. Here is the link in the rare event you're interested:
http://www.macosxautomation.com/applescript/firsttutorial/index.html
Now that I've worked half of the beginners lessons I'm beginning to see what an advantage learning how to use AppleScript can be. Particularly if you've as pedantic as I am. I actually have no idea how pedantic I am is, but I do get upset if everything don't line up the way I want it to. Particularly in the Mac Mail program. I like it a lot. I just don't know how to get the results I want. Presently, from what I've seen happen with AppleScript so far, the picayune stuff I want to happen shouldn't be a problem.
One of the ways I've realized I'm a little picky is the way I handled cleaning up my hard drive on my first computer. It was a Mac Classic, and had what was considered at the time a huge hard drive. Forty whole megabytes. That's right. Not forty gigabytes, but forty MEGABYTES. People didn't have a clue the way things were gonna get bloated fast.
The Mac Classic was one of the first home computers that came from the manufacturer with a hard drive. Any hard drive. Needless to say. Forty megabytes of storage got smaller and smaller as time went by. I had to remove stuff from my hard drive and put it on floppy discs in order to make room on the hard drive. It wasn't rocket science, but a little tedious, and I just loved it. I guess I'll never really understand it well enough to describe (I got other fish to fry). but love solving those kinds of problems.
Now, I don't have any problems with storage. It's just me. I don't keep recorded music on my computer legal or otherwise. I like live music. I like listening to real people. If I can't afford it, it just gets better when I can. Listening to recorded music takes the joy out of being there for me.
My Mac Mini came with an eighty gig hard drive. I have less than thirty gigs of data on it. I have an external hard drive that has three hundred gigs on it. I use it as my main drive because it's a 7200 rpm and the one that came with the Mac Mini is a laptop drive that only turns at 4200 rpms. The external drive is much faster. I'm gonna partition it and use half of it as a Time Machine drive, but I've been too lazy to do that yet. I save everything all at once with SuperDuper.
I'm still excited about the 64-bit OS Apple is coming out with this fall. I might splurge for a Mac Pro, but more than likely I'll cave for something cheaper. Computing is a'fixing to get a lot faster. Orders of magnitude better I'm betting. The real deal with a new 64-bit OS is how much DRAM it can accommodate. From what I'm reading about what's possible by cranking the OS up to 64-bits, I won't be able to afford how much DRAM it will use. The real limit will be determined by how many memory slots come on the motherboard.
The last announcement I remember seeing about how many gigabytes of DRAM on a memory card was made by Samsung for the 32 gigabyte memory card. That one card would hold all the data on my hard drive, and my hard drive has a lotta stuff on it that don't need to be there.
My interest in this stuff is just crazy. I'm not unhappy with my Mac Mini. Especially since I maxxed out the DRAM at two whole gigabytes way back a month or so ago. Every aspect of using this computer is dramatically mo' bettah with the memory upgrade, and now I'm looking forward to having more DRAM on a 64-bit operating system than there is data on the hard drive. For all practical purposes, the kind of computing I do won't get much faster. When the hardware is so much faster than the necessary software there is no practical need for it.
I'm excited about the news this morning that Google has openly admitted they're creating an operating system specifically for being online. I agree they've found a chink in Microsoft's armor by focusing on an operating system designed to be online as effectively as possible. Microsoft was already an internet dinosaur when they took so long to steal their own browser.
It's my sense of things that Google has a great idea... again. For me, there was a huge divide created by the invention of the World Wide Web. I was online when it came online, but not by much. I had owned my own computer for five or six years before we got an ISP here that provided me and my youngest brother with a local phone number. That was huge. HUGE!! He makes a living now with a couple of online companies that's somehow surviving the economic meltdown. Not me though. I took some unconscious vow of poverty.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
