by Jason Snell
Pixelmator Pro adds AppleScript support
AppleScript is an old-school scripting language, but it’s still the standard on the Mac when it comes to user automation. If a Mac app doesn’t support AppleScript, it closes a window of possible uses that could have been made possible by wiring it into user scripts and passing data to other apps.
That’s why it’s such great news that Pixelmator Pro 1.8, just released, adds support for AppleScript:
Almost every part of Pixelmator Pro is now scriptable, so for pretty much anything you can do with the app, you can now script those same tasks. Say you have tens or even hundreds of images. You might need to export and optimize them, or change the color of certain objects in them, or maybe even add annotations, taking the text from a Numbers spreadsheet and automatically placing it in Pixelmator Pro. Thanks to AppleScript support, you can now do all that, plus a whole lot more.
How serious is Pixelmator about this? They got Sal Soghoian, who was Apple’s user automation lead for a couple of decades, to help them build their scripting dictionary and lend his style to an AppleScript tutorial.
I still expect that Apple will eventually replace AppleScript with a Mac version of Shortcuts, but who knows? AppleScript has already survived the transition from Motorola 680×0 to PowerPC, from classic Mac OS to OS X, from PowerPC to Intel, and shortly from Intel to Apple silicon. It’s a survivor. And I’m glad it’s still kicking.