Many moons ago, I was a humble (well, humble-ish) Graphic Designer at a small print shop. My life was made a misery by all the routine, time-consuming non-graphic design stuff I had to do in the course of the day. Stepping up business cards for output, exporting a stack of Illustrator files as PDFs, zipping and uploading files to FTP sites… it was a pain.

Sure, I’d heard of AppleScript and tried my hand at it but I just couldn’t make head nor tail of the scripting dictionaries. And when stuff wasn’t working I had no idea why not.

That all changed when I got my hands on a copy of Script Debugger from Late Night Software. I’ve been recommending it to would-be AppleScripters ever since. It gave a nice view of applications’ dictionaries and they suddenly made sense. It made debugging so much easier and I was actually able to figure out why my scripts weren’t working… most of the time anyway.

Over ten years on and I still use it on the (admittedly rare) occasions when I dip my toes into AppleScript, and I’d be lost without it. Script Debugger is still going strong and it looks like the latest release brings some cool new features and a stripped down free version.

If you have an interest in scripting/automation on macOS, do yourself a favour and get a copy of Script Debugger.

Of course, if you don’t want to get your hands dirty with scripting, you can talk to us about custom scripting. No job too small! Click here for more info.

NB. We’re not affiliated with Late Night Software in any way – we’re just big fans of their product.