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

Apple's highly useful scripting language is one of the Mac's hidden gems.

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Check your IP address

A simple IP utility from ScriptBuilders (accessible from the Scriptbuilders site) lets you quickly check your external IP address and copy it to your clipboard for tasks such as setting up a VPN or supporting a remote access connection.

Add lyrics to iTunes

There are hundreds of iTunes AppleScripts out there on sites such as Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes. For example, you can make tracks "bookmarkable" so they resume playing wherever they left off or pick items on an iPod so they're copied into an iTunes folder.

One of the more amusing is a script that automatically searches a database on the Web and adds a text version of a song's lyrics into iTunes. Not all songs work properly, but when a match is found, you get to see full lyrics downloaded into iTunes.

iTunes volume fade-in and fade-out

For audiophiles who prefer that their music fade in when starting up and fade out when a tune is paused or restarted manually in mid-play, O'Reilly's MacDevCenter site offers several iTunes scripts that do just that, either with or without dialog boxes.

Quick image manipulation

I'd wager that a fair number of AppleScript users would be surprised to learn that they don't need an app like Photoshop in order to script things like rotating or resizing an image.

The following script from the book Apple Training Series: AppleScript 1-2-3 resizes an image to 50% of the original.

Of course, Photoshop gives you much more control over how images are sized, so this isn't a great technique to size images for printing or publication. However, for a quick e-mail attachment, it should be fine. There are also versions on the same Web page to size for maximum width or height, with user input setting the parameters.

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