![]() Watching the videos while trialling SD6 revealed a lot about both the features that were new to me and how to take advantage of some I thought I already understood. In my trials of SD4 and SD5, I’d come to the conclusion that just clicking around and trying to figure things out on my own as you can do with most apps was not going to work. You are definitely going to want to RTFM! with this one.Īccordingly, I spent most of the first couple of days of my trial checking out the tutorial videos on the developer’s website. If you’ve been scripting in Apple’s Script Editor for any length of time, then the experience of moving from that spartan window to Script Debugger’s feature-laden, multi-paned, multi-faceted interface is somewhat reminiscent of those disaster movies where some guy who can fly a Cessna is suddenly thrust into the cockpit of a 747. A 20-day trial, you say? Should be plenty, right? But first, I’d have to invest the time getting to know it. So there’s a challenge: if SD6 could convince me it had enough compelling features that would be as useful to my AppleScripting as Coda is to my web-related tasks, then I’d be willing to buy. I also use it to manage my AWS server uploads. I use Coda a lot for editing and creating html and javascript documents. The one exception I have is Coda (also $99 at the time I bought it). It’s more expensive than almost all the other software I own: Affinity Designer, Scrivener, Camtasia, Carbon Copy Cloner, Little Snitch, 1Password are all cheaper. In June this year, Script Debugger’s developers, Late Night Software, released SD6 and the most interesting feature to this non-professional but regular scripter wasn’t any of the things we’ll discuss below, but the price point: a permanent 50% reduction to $99 for a single user license. My trials of SD4 and SD5 didn’t get much further than a couple of launches fiddling around a bit and deciding it wasn’t for me. ![]() ![]() There just didn’t seem to be $200-worth of things wrong with Apple’s free Script Editor to justify my investing either the time or money in getting to know and buying Script Debugger. If, as I’d oft-heard many other scripters say, it was well worth the money, then I assumed the value must be for those that needed features I didn’t. My view had always been that there was little point in investing the time it would take to get any benefit out of the software when I was unwilling to accept the price point. SD4 and SD5 would run you to $199 for a single-user license for starters, and if you didn’t sit down and thoroughly explore Script Debugger’s feature-laden interface, you ran the very real risk of not only wasting your money but also being overwhelmed by yet more dark AppleScript mystery. The reason for that is that Script Debugger has always had its own barriers to entry: there is an investment of both time and money which anyone other than a professional scripter can easily balk at. Script Debugger has been around for a long time, pretty much as long as AppleScript itself, and existing users will surely say “we could have told you all that years ago!” True, and I did in fact run trials of Script Debugger 4 and Script Debugger 5 without being much impressed, let alone having any kind of epiphany. The reward of surviving a trial-by-AppleScript to produce something that actually works and works reliably, that solves a problem you once had and now, magically, do not, is what makes AppleScripting quintessentially AppleScripting, isn’t it? The difficulty, surely, is part of the fun! If that’s true, then Script Debugger 6 will force you to find a different, and more productive, kind of joy in your AppleScripting work.īut wait a minute. ![]() The secret that Script Debugger seems to lay bare is that AppleScripting doesn’t have to be as painful as we’ve been conditioned to believe. Hurdles you’ve taught yourself to clear – through considerable effort, frustration and no small amount of bloody-minded tenacity – are removed before you get to them obstacles you’ve habitually steered around or avoided have disappeared, and dark holes of AppleScript mystery appear, in the light shone on them by SD6, to be not the menacing entities you once feared but new friends that offer ways to do things faster and more effectively. When you’ve spent pretty much your entire AppleScripting life behind the wheel of Apple’s austere Script Editor application, taking Script Debugger 6 out for a 20-day spin feels like someone’s let you in on a secret you’re not supposed to know. SCRIPT DEBUGGER 6 – Late Night Software’s solution to the pains of AppleScripting This product review by Phil Stokes first appeared on, July 2016.
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