RubyCocoa is a bridge between the Mac OS X Cocoa Framework API that makes it callable from Ruby code. You can create applications, objects, call Mac OS X Services. You can even call Applescript:

require 'osx/cocoa'
include OSX
def speak (str)
  str.gsub! (/"/, '\"')
  src = %(say "#{str}")
  NSAppleScript.alloc.initWithSource(src).executeAndReturnError(nil)
end
speak "Hello World!"
speak "Kon nich Wah. Ogan key desu ka?"

Ben Bleything submitted a talk to RubyConf, titled “Harmonize: Exploiting RubyCocoa and Sync Services for Fun and Profit” where he discusses making a wrapper around the SyncAPI in Ruby. (blog post introducing Harmonize)

RubyCocoa looks like it may have stagnated a little as the last release was November 2005, but perhaps with such a renewed interest in Ruby, and Mac OS X gaining popularity, perhaps new life with be breathed into it. Projects such as SyncBridge and Harmonize also obviously help.

Update: Check out the very good examples and information at RubyCocoa.com, including how to use your Apple Remote from RubyCocoa .

I’m making the transition to a much more stable, usable, and tool-rich photo management tool, iView Media Pro 3. I got tired of dealing with the incredibly slow interface to iPhoto thanks to Apple’s incapable handling & testing of EXIF metadata in storing to their library.

But I digress.

Behold, there was scripting

… and it was good.

I had written an Applescript to set the latitude & longitude (and other location info) to selected photos in iPhoto. iPhoto was often beligerent and required a restart of the iPhoto (and possible database recreation) to read the location information (which was viewable in the “info” panel).

iView puts the location info as a user-editable set of fields in the EXIF data fields. Users can set city, region, country, etc. But for whatever reason, they are unable to change the latitude & longitude.

I paired down my iPhoto script to just handle latitude & longitude and handle getting the file name from iView. The tough part was how to get from the iView example selected_images to a useful POSIX path to feed to exiftool. This code does the trick.

set selectedID to selected_images(1)
if selectedID = {} then
	display dialog "No photos selected"
	return
end if

repeat with this_photo in selectedID
	set photo_path to path of this_photo
	set the image_file to the POSIX path of photo_path

Installing & Using the script

Download the script here and expand it in your ~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Scripts folder and then reload iView. You will also need exiftool, as it is the real magic behind the smoke & mirrors.

To use the script, select whatever photos you want to apply the same location information to. Then go to the “Scripts” icon in the menu bar, and choose the “Set Lat/Lon” script. Enter the latitude, longitude, and altitude in decimal format, pressing “OK” after each field. Wait a little while, and then a dialog will tell you how many photos were processed.

Back in iView, you should see the latitude & longitude information in the right side-bar. You can also turn on lat/lon view in the thumbnail view by pressing Command-J and selecting “Latitude” “Longitude” “Altitude”. You may need to press Command-B to rebuild the thumbnail to have the info show up the first time (or on updates).

When exporting images (say to flickr!), your geo-annotated data will stay intact and can then be mapped (or mapped).

Sometimes people put together some useful, if perhaps odd, guides.

Applescript for Python Programmers is a set of tables mapping Python syntax, functions, and interfaces to the equivalent Applescript. Actually pretty nice for understanding both languages.

Are there others out there like this? Particularly I would think the following would be particularly useful:

• C++ < -> Obj-C
• Javascript < -> PHP < -> Perl
• HTML < -> XML/XSLT

Here is some quick Applescript that uses ExifTool to write Copyright, Title, Comments, and Keyword exif data to selected photos in iPhoto:

This script is released under the Creative Commons.

-- This applescript will set the exif keywords, name,
--  and comments of all selected iPhoto images using
--  the information current in iPhoto.
--
-- Author: Andrew Turner (http://highearthorbit.com)
--
property copyright : ¬
		"Copyright Andrew Turner, 2005. All Rights Reserved."
property URL : "http://highearthorbit.com"
property exifToolOriginal : "_original"

-- True retains copyright, False means Public Domain
property Copyrighted : "True"

tell application "iPhoto"
	activate
	try
		copy (my selected_images()) to these_images
		if these_images is false or (the count of these_images) ¬
			is 0 then ¬
			error "Please select a single image."

		repeat with i from 1 to the count of these_images
			set the keywordslist to ""
			set this_photo to item i of these_images
			tell this_photo
				set the image_file to the image path
				set the image_title to the title
				set the image_filename to the image filename
				set the image_comment to the comment
				set the assigned_keywords to the name of keywords
			end tell
			repeat with j from 1 to the count of assigned_keywords
				set the keywordslist to keywordslist & " -keywords+=" ¬
					& item j of assigned_keywords
			end repeat
			set output to do shell script ¬
				"exiftool -title='" & image_title & ¬
				"' " & keywordslist & ¬
				" " & " -comment='" & image_comment & ¬
				"' " & " -Copyright='" & copyright & ¬
				"' " & " -CopyrightNotice='" & copyright & ¬
				"' " & " -Rights='" & copyright & ¬
				"' " & " -Marked='" & Copyrighted & ¬
				"' " & "'" & image_file & "'"
			do shell script "rm '" & image_file & "'" ¬
				& exifToolOriginal
		end repeat

		display dialog "Exif writing complete."
	on error error_message number error_number
		if the error_number is not -128 then
			display dialog error_message buttons {"Cancel"} ¬
				default button 1
		end if
	end try
end tell

on selected_images()
	tell application "iPhoto"
		try
			-- get selection
			set these_items to the selection
			-- check for single album selected
			if the class of item 1 of these_items is album then error
			-- return the list of selected photos
			return these_items
		on error
			return false
		end try
	end tell
end selected_images

You can grab this script and a simpler Copyright only, as well as a Location (latitude/longitude/city,region,country) script here.