Brilliant. AppleScript is underrated as an automation language. Sure, it's a bit cumbersome to write, but nobody says you have to use it for everything. It play

Brilliant. AppleScript is underrated as an automation language. Sure, it's a bit cumbersome to write, but nobody says you have to use it for everything. It plays well enough with shell scripts that you can leave the heavy lifting to another language and use AppleScript as a bridge between the command line and the UI. Me and a friend once wrote a bot in Python to control various music players from IRC. The bot uses AppleScript to talk to iTunes on OS X, and GObject introspection (or whatever they use on GNOME these days; I have little experience with desktop Linux) to talk to Rhythmbox. See http://github.com/GeneralMaximus/amazing-horse http://github.com/GeneralMaximus/amazing-horse All of Apple's official applications support scripting, so do most good third party apps. You don't need extra JS on your page to autorefresh Safari. This little snipped reloads the front-most Safari tab: tell application "Safari" set sameURL to URL of tab 1 of front window set URL of tab 1 of front window to sameURL end tell You can even send Safari a snippet of JS to run. It's possible to automate any UI interaction by sending mouse clicks or keyboard events to tell application "System Events". You can look at any app's AppleScript dictionary using the AppleScript Editor. Go File -> Open AppleScript Dictionary ... and then pick your app.