Apple called this “ JavaScript for Automation.” Because this is a mouthful, it often abbreviated as JXA. Mavericks (10.9) included a JavaScript syntax for the Open Scripting Architecture (OSA), which is the underlying framework for all AppleScript functionality. The last major changes to AppleScript came with Mavericks and Yosemite. Now that Shortcuts has made the jump from iOS, there may be hope for another revival? It just seems like it hasn’t gotten much love over the last decade or so. Instead, we saw AppleScript’s support from Apple and third parties slowly wane over the years.ĪppleScript is stil very much present and functional in recent versions of macOS. Much of Automator was based on AppleScript and users expected a more and improved AppleScript support because of that going forward. With Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Apple introduced Automator, which provided a neat UI to put together workflows. AppleScript has a very distinct set of strengths (interapplication communication) and weaknesses (awkward syntax and inconsitent application functionality and dictionaries) but it has been serving its purpose well for many users.

In the late nineties, there was concern that it wouldn’t make the transition to Mac OS X, but AppleScript made the jump and has happily co-existed with the Terminal and shell scripting as an automation tool on macOS. (Re-)Introducing JavaScript for AutomationĪppleScript has been part of macOS since System 7.1. Most of the credit for popularizing and explaining this goes to ( on Twitter) in the #bash and #scripting channels. However, from discussions in MacAdmins Slack, a new option has emerged. So far, I have recommended to build native Swift command line tools to replace python calls.

Get Current User in Shell Scripts on macOS – Scripting OS X.

MDM custom preference to disable python 2 deprecation popups – Graham R Pugh.

macOS Monterey prompt: “….” needs to be updated – Ben Toms.

Monterey, python, and free disk space – Scripting OS X.

I and others have written about this before: To be precise, built-in python has been deprecated since macOS Catalina, but Monterey will now throw up dialogs warning the user that an app or process using built-in python needs to be updated. Monterey has deprecated the pre-installed python on macOS.

Javascript download mac os x