Learning AppleScript: Creating a "Do Not Disturb" Toggle

Tech Blog :: Learning AppleScript: Creating a "Do Not Disturb" Toggle

Jul 10 '10 12:00am

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Shrt.ct

On a whim I decided to start learning AppleScript tonight. AppleScript is one of the great features of OSX, and allows scripts to communicate pretty much with any [decently built] application.

The first use case I could think of was a little toggle for quiet time, a "Do Not Disturb" toggle. It has 2 modes, Quiet and Noisy. In Quiet mode it puts Mailplane into its own "Do Not Disturb" mode, logs out of iChat, closes Skype, turns off Growl, and turns on Caffeine (assuming this quiet time also involves concentrated looking at the screen). Noisy mode is normal; flipping that switch logs back into iChat, and turns Mailplane and Growl back on. (It doesn't toggle all the same things; I don't always have Skype on and Caffeine shouldn't necessarily be turned off. More on that below.)

Here's the code:

-- figure out: how can it REMEMBER from one run to the next (e.g. were caffeine, ichat on?)
 
set appName to "DoNotDisturb Toggle"  -- for display later
 
-- register with Growl
tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
	set the allNotificationsList to {"toggle-announce"}
	copy allNotificationsList to enabledNotificationsList
	register as application ¬
		appName all notifications allNotificationsList ¬
		default notifications enabledNotificationsList
end tell
 
display dialog "Noisy or Quiet?" buttons {"Noisy", "Silent"}
set doMode to button returned of result
 
if doMode is "Noisy" then
	tell application "Mailplane" to set doNotDisturb to false
 
	tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
		launch
		notify with name "toggle-announce" title appName ¬
			description "Going back to Noisy mode" application name appName
	end tell
 
	tell application "iChat" to log in # what if it wasn't before?
 
else -- Quiet
	tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
		notify with name "toggle-announce" title appName ¬
			description "Going into Quiet mode" application name appName
		quit
	end tell
 
	tell application "Mailplane" to set doNotDisturb to true
 
	tell application "Caffeine" to turn on # (turn on for quiet but don't turn off on noisy)
 
	tell application "iChat" to log out
	tell application "Skype" to quit
 
end if

I turned it into an Application (File->Save As), so it's easy to run from the Dock.

What I need to figure out is how it can remember states from one run to the other: it should only log back into iChat, for instance, if it was logged in before going into Quiet mode. Does anyone know?

By goarilla (not verified) on Mon, 07/12/2010 - 04:25:

What I need to figure out is how it can remember states from one run to the other: it should only log back into iChat, for instance, if it was logged in before going into Quiet mode. Does anyone know?

maybe use a custom defaults write and parsing it
with defaults read ?