10 AppleScripts to make you love your Mac (even more)

The good news here is that you can get some decent support for regular expressions by installing a free add-on from Satimage or, for smaller amounts of text, dumping it into an app like TextWrangler, which has such support. AppleScript can also incorporate more powerful commands from Perl, Ruby, Unix or anything else that can be accessed via a shell script, and then assign the results to a variable. For more on that, check out Apple's technical note called "do shell script in AppleScript."

Despite its drawbacks -- and what language doesn't have any? -- I've found AppleScript to be a great tool for parsing drudgework out of my workday.

And now, without further ado, here's a sampling of cool AppleScripts out there that just might make you love your Mac even more.

Search for any term in your clipboard on Computerworld or elsewhere

This is one of my faves: Take any term you've copied into your clipboard (command-C), regardless of the app you're in, and Safari displays search results on that term from Computerworld.com.

To use:

1. Copy the code.
2. Open your script editor (you'll find it in your Applications/AppleScript folder).
3. Paste the code into the larger top portion of your script editor.
4. Save the file as a script in your Library/Scripts folder. (Note: If you open the AppleScript utility in the Applications/AppleScript folder, you can have your script menu display in the top menu bar.)

If you want scripts that will search for terms in your clipboard at other sites, MacScripter has AppleScript versions posted for searching highlighted text on Google and Wikipedia (within Safari only). Download and install in your Scripts folder.