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PreFab UI Actions

Features and Benefits

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UI Actions and "universal attachability"

PreFab UI Actions brings "universal attachability" to AppleScript, greatly enhancing your control over applications running on your computer. Attach a UI Action script to any standard native Mac OS X application, and UI Actions will automatically run the script whenever you perform specified user actions in the target application. You select the user actions that trigger a UI Action script, including any of the following:



UI Actions is a scriptable faceless background application, offering AppleScript commands to attach and detach UI Action scripts, to enable and disable them, and to get a reference to the affected UI element for use in your UI Action scripts.

UI Actions Setup works with UI Actions. It provides a convenient graphical user interface to attach UI Action scripts to applications and to manage all of your UI Action scripts.

When you attach a script, UI Actions starts monitoring the target application for notifications that are issued by all native Mac OS X applications written to Apple's specifications. When UI Actions detects activity, it runs the attached script automatically. You select the user action that triggers the script from a list of notifications, such as opening a window or choosing a menu item, and you apply an optional filter that limits the response to a specific kind of UI element or a UI element with a specific title.

You can write UI Action scripts to do almost anything in response to a user's activity in the target application. UI Action scripts use standard AppleScript commands and AppleScript commands recognized by the target application, as well as AppleScript commands added by Apple's new GUI Scripting technology. Every UI Action script receives a reference to the UI element that triggered it, and it can use this reference to fine-tune its control of the target application.

You can attach a UI Action script to a target application and specify its trigger and filter by using the included UI Actions Setup application. You can also automate the process by running a setup script that uses the UI Actions 'attach UI action script' command.

UI Actions is similar to Apple's Folder Actions and Digital Hub Actions scripting additions, because it lets you respond and control what happens when a user does something with the computer. But it is universal, because UI Action scripts can respond to almost anything a user does in almost any application.

UI Actions and Accessibility

PreFab Software has unmatched experience controlling the GUI via scripts, releasing PreFab Player in 1994 with continued sales and support today for Mac OS 9 and earlier. Now, PreFab brings its expertise to you on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and newer with UI Actions, a utility that brings "universal attachability" to AppleScript.

UI Actions supports both traditional AppleScript and GUI Scripting. Apple released Mac OS X 10.3 in October 2003, including by default full support for GUI Scripting. GUI Scripting is a technology for Mac OS X having many similarities to PreFab Player. It allows you to manipulate any Macintosh application by writing simple AppleScript scripts to control its menus, buttons and other user controls, even if the target application is not scriptable. For more information about GUI Scripting, visit Apple's link_outGUI Scripting Web site.

Formerly, in Mac OS X 10.2.3 Jaguar and newer, GUI Scripting was only available to users who specially downloaded and installed a beta version made available by Apple for public testing. Because GUI Scripting is now automatically installed by default on all Macintosh computers running Mac OS X 10.3 Panther or newer, you can distribute your UI Action scripts for use wherever UI Actions is installed.

GUI Scripting brings Apple's new Accessibility technology to every scripter, enabling you to explore and manipulate the user interface of almost all Mac OS X applications running on your computer. It doesn't matter whether they were written for the Carbon environment or the Cocoa environment, or whether they were written in C, C++ or Objective-C—if they were written using one of Apple's standard programming environments, Apple has already made sure they are accessible.

PreFab UI Actions and Apple's GUI Scripting both rely on "Accessibility" technology that is designed to make the Macintosh more accessible to persons with disabilities. As Apple continues to improve accessibility in the future, UI Actions will automatically take advantage of many of these changes.

Note that custom controls in some applications may not be accessible to GUI Scripting or UI Actions until their developers release a new version that supports accessibility.

Updated on March 8, 2007. Send questions or comments to emailsupport@prefabsoftware.com.

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