The best way to learn these concepts is to open up one.  That is just what I did.  I found a script that formatted iTunes data.  I was not satisfied with all of its features so I modified it.  I left credit to the original authors in the modified script.

First, we need to create a file structure.  Create a folder called name.AdiumScripts.  name can be anything you like, just make sure you don’t forget it.  Then right click(CTLR+click), and click ’show package contents.’  Create a folder called Contents.  Inside Contents, create a folder called Resources.  The result:

->name.AdiumScripts
–>Contents
—->Resources

Enter the contents folder. Click HERE for the info.plist file that will direct Adium where to get your script.  Place it in the contents folder.

The following is how the file looks:

name corresponds to the name of your project from earlier.  Under <key>File</key>, we specify the name of the script file that will be called each time %_name is called.  Of course, you can change any of these.  It is also possible to create more callable scripts by copying and pasting.

Now enter the Resources folder.  Create a file called name, or whatever you may have changed name to, with the file extension .scpt. You can either use your favorite text editor or the Script Editor.  This is where we will create our actual script that displays the data.

The following script has the following sample output:

Reading and listening to You Are The Pan
By John Williams
From Hook (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack).

The first line is shows my default action combined with the current song name.  The next lines are the artist, and the album.  If iTunes is not active, whether it is paused or not open, the default action will appear.  In the above example, the default action is Reading.  The modified script can be found by clicking HERE.

The code is pretty simple to follow so I won’t go into details here.  It is very simple to add more formatting.  It is just a matter of copying and pasting.  The column names found in iTunes are pretty much the same as they are in AppleScript e.g. to access the genre of a track, just use the variable genre.  Adding more substitutions, that is adding more features like %_name, is as simple as expanding the XML tree and placing the new script files in the same directory.

Like always, if you plan on creating a published add-on, be sure to adhere to any current standards. And that’s it. Just click on name.AdiumScripts to install.

Your files will be installed in Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Scripts

One of my favorite applications on my Mac is iTunes, so its no surprise this is the first application I turned to for testing. To start, import the proper library:

Afterward, we can create a handle to iTunes and tell it to play:

Running the above lines will open up the application called iTunes and execute the action play.  It will play the current track and specific tracks can be passed as an argument. The action .stop() will stop iTunes. Of course, we can do so much more with appscript. For instance, we can create a playlist that only plays a specific album.  I wrote a script that does just that.

The script can be found HERE in a zipped file.

It is documented and should be easy to follow.  One more thing, it is also possible to assign values to each track as if they were normal data objects.