Courtesy of OSWeekly.com

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AppleScript and Visual Studio are two entirely different things. Microsoft's offering is for people who want to roll up their sleeves and get really close and personal with developing for Windows, and it's not a tool that's best suited for hobbyists. A good amount of the software that you use on your computer was probably built with the help of Visual Studio, so that should tell you who the core audience for the software is. In addition to being rather complex, it's also quite pricey to ride this development train. In this case, you really do pay for power.

In contrast, the basics of AppleScript are included for free with OS X, and while you may not have the same amount of power and flexibility that you have with Visual Studio, at least you can get started with writing and executing scripts. Apple's stance is that we all have a number of repetitive and mindless tasks that we need to carry out on our computers each day, and while doing so manually may have been working for us, why not automate these things?

Isn't it nice when things automatically happen in the right way? It's a welcome surprise, right? Well, instead of waiting for your computer to learn from your actions and automate certain tasks for you, you can take control with AppleScript and make automation become a reality today. Whether you need to slightly rename all of the files in a particular folder or do anything else like that, AppleScript is there for you. Don't let the apparent simplicity fool you though - this language has some brain power. Instead of directly being told what to do, AppleScript can actually make decisions based off of user input and by evaluating received data, so it can definitely be more of a benefit than a burden. Plus, by using AppleScript Studio, you can take your bland looking scripts and turn them into beautiful applications that contain all of the widgets that you're used to (buttons, sliders, tabs and much more).

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