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Comment by Sirened | Hacker News Reader

Apple Script is a weird but cool feature. There's also another thing called "Remote Apple Events" which essentially lets you use Apple Script over the internet via some weird RPC system. It's super bizarre and I have yet to find a legitimate use for it but it works nonetheless.

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Remote Apple Events were super useful back in the classic Mac days - it used it for instance to dial up or hang up the 56k modem on the Mac that was acting as our router. It also made it super easy to write networked games in HyperCard.

I guess it lives on since enough people have some vital QuarkXPress workflow they can't abandon...

Remote Apple Events are pretty fantastic. Back in 2002/2003, I wrote an AppleScript Studio application (with a little bit of Objective-C) that let you control iTunes on another machine.

It seemed like absolute magic at the time to me and my friends - from my PowerBook on the couch, we could change the song playing on the iMac on the other side of the room! Wish I still had that source code to look at.

If I'm not mistaken, that is still used in some parts of the pre-Home Sharing remote Library and remote playback functionality in iTunes (pre-Music.. man, that's a lot of prerequisites).

Remote events even worked across AppleTalk and TCP/IP, across macOS and Mac OS Classic, so you could make use of some of the features between computers on different networks, with 10+ years difference in software, and it would still 'magically' work.

After RAOP and mDNS etc. the event system was less used and most of the newer features are implemented as classic client-server applications. But it still exists, and still works. Apple Events are even advertised over Bonjour!

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