Well, I’m a little late to the announcement party. Can I claim I’m just being fashionable? On Tuesday, the MacBU started up its new team blog called Mac Mojo! I’ll be one of the contributers there, along with a bunch of other current MacBU bloggers and several new folks. I see that Brad, Sheridan, and Joe have already dipped their toes into the blog ocean. So, come read us over there!
As for myself, I’ve been pretty quiet here. I’ve received a lot of great feedback on VB and made sure it got into the proper inboxes at work. Thank you all for your comments and feedback. Alas, there’s no way I can ever reply to every comment, but I have read them all. I plan to post some snippets of VB-to-AppleScript conversions so that people can get a rough idea of what you can do with AS.
That will have to wait a few days, however, because I’ve got a ton of stuff to do at work. I just got back this evening from a week’s vacation with my family in Las Vegas. Nope, no gambling, but we did spend a lot of time at the pool (my son now loves waterslides, provided I hold him as we slide down) and wandering through several of the mega-hotels on the Strip. My son had a very hard time believing that this was *all* Las Vegas. I think he thought the hotel itself was named LV, and that everywhere outside it was some other magical new place (Bellagio fountains, MGM lions, Mandalay Bay shark reef, Mirage volcano and dolphins, Caesars Palace Forum, it just went on and on…!)
So, after having been gone for a week, I came back to 772 new messages in my work inbox (110 per day!) that I need to cull through. Wheee!
2 replies on “Vegas Mojo”
Welcome back.
Joshua
I’ve personally only needed Visual Basic occasionally over the years, and I imagine that I’d be able to use AppleScript instead if the need arose again. So personally I understand your group’s decision and probably would have made the same decision myself. Anything that speeds up the delivery of a universal binary is good news … I find that Excel and Powerpoint launch and run much more quickly inside WinXP via Parallels on my MacBook than they do using the current Mac versions, which is a strange situation to be in.
The main worry for Mac users now would be if you’re collaborating with people on a project where your colleagues make use of VB macros written for Office for Windows. But the idea of converting VB macros to AppleScript is intriguing. Would it be theoretically possible under any imaginable scenario to automate such a process? If the Office actions that are scriptable on Windows through VB are all scriptable on the Mac under AS, then at least at the most abstracted level, you’re just dealing with two Turing Machines, and in principle you could make a converter application for converting the source code from one to the other.