Courtesy of OSWeekly.com

(Column) - Operating systems are complicated creatures, and their complexity isn't only based on their ease of use. Another contributing factor is size, and no matter how simple something is to use, if there's a lot going on, and the possibilities seem endless, the feeling of complexity can easily seep in.

You may think that you're utilizing your OS in a relatively complete way, but chances are that you haven't even scratched the surface. There are so many hidden gems to find and play around with, and while the success of your experience isn't dependent on your taking advantage of them, at least they can help to open up your eyes and get you involved with new things.

Apple has thus included a scripting language called AppleScript with OS X, and you've probably at the very least heard of it. It's only right that the creator of an operating system would give us a proper tool to use to take control over some of the things that are being done on our machines.

For further proof of this thought, just look at what Microsoft has been doing. They've long been an active supporter of the development community, and instead of just watching other companies build and release programming languages for their OS, they jumped into the game, too. The current result is a suite of tools called Visual Studio, and some of the components of that suite (such as Visual Basic) will probably be recognizable to you. In fact, you may have even messed around with previous versions of the software in the past.

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