Applescript

it's an applescript that deletes the user's entire home directory. ...

it's a simple applescript that edits Finder's preferences file and relaunches Finder. ...

I started out with going through this tutorial step by step. This site's good too http://macscripter.net/ :)

I'd really like to get my head 'round appleScript, but have precious little scripting experience (HTML's about it really). Can anyone point me in the right direction for the complete idiot's quickstart? ta

This is starting to get Off Topic "Unix & X11" EasyCrop by YellowMug Software is shareware that can crop, rescale, rotate, etc an image. The interface is very intuitive once you comprehend the graphical nature. The only 100% free alternative in Panther is to use AppleScript, which can be a bit confusing.

to an applescript working for any context the OS is under. ...

Thanks, I will look into that. I'm fairly new to shell scripting and a total newbie to AppleScript, but I'm willing to try.

You could probably write a shell script (or an Applescript?) to automatically mount your network drives for you. I've never done it, but my college Unix computers ran a script at each login to mount the drives, even our Windows machines did that to connect to the Unix servers. Maybe you could put the commands to mount the drive in your ~/.profile so they would run at login...

Widgets are NOT web pages. They are widgets that use the same languages and structures that web pages use, with a little Cocoa thrown in, but they are most definitely not HTML pages -- they're actually XML, but they will not open in a browser. They are extremely easy to write, though, if you've ever written a little JavaScript... for example, here's a little code from Arlo...

As we now know, the widgets appear to be nothing but web-pages (with some extra's). I don't think it would be difficult to hack them to run outside of the Dashboard. First of all, what happens if you load them in Safari? Does it simply display them inside the browser window? What happens if you try to run the JavaScript with the Java AppletRunner? Can we build a simple app to...