MacMost: JavaScript

If you need to do a "Mail Merge" to print out personalized documents from Pages, you can do it with a simple script. A table from Numbers can be used to customize text boxes in the Pages document and then you can print them all at once.

If you need a clock or countdown timer in your iMovie video, you can create one in Keynote and export it to use in iMovie. You can manually create each second as a slide, or use this simple script to add all of the slides automatically. In iMovie you can adjust the size, color and even reverse the overlay to count down or up.

Many Mac users wish there was a way to create a new text file in the Finder just like you can in Windows. With the help of a simple Automator service you can add this to your Mac, and even customize how it works.

Early personal computers made it easy to get into programming. Today's computers come ready-to-use and most people will never write a single line of code. Learn the basic concepts of coding with 6 lessons in less then 20 minutes. Use Script Editor on your Mac to write simple programs and take your first steps in learning how software works.

One advantage that Numbers for iPad has over Numbers for Mac is Form mode. If you want to simulate a form in Mac Numbers, you can do it using a few lines of JavaScript code in Script Editor and even make those script available in the menu bar. This could be the starting point for a more complex set of scripts that check values and even allow you to edit row data in a form too.

You can use JavaScript in Automator to fill in a web page form. If you make this a Quick Action you can access it from the menu bar or as a keyboard shortcut. This can help speed up situations where you need to fill in the same form every day.

If you want to make it as easy as possible to call people you can set up a single-action icon that you can tap on your iPhone or click on your Mac to make the call. On the iPhone you can use the Shortcuts app to build a shortcut and place it on your Home screen. On your Mac you can use Automator with a shell script and some JavaScript to place an app in your Dock to make the call with a single click.

You can use JXA in the Script Editor or Automator to set the location of a window to an exact location and size. It is easy to set up the one-line script and reuse it by simply changing the application name and size numbers. You can also create an Automator service to repeat a setting you use often.

There is no way in Photos to get a list of all of the photos that have no keyword tags applied to them. But with a little JavaScript in Automator you can add this command to Photos and use it with all photos or any selection of photos.

You can use the Script Editor app on your Mac to create JavaScript programs that control other apps. In this example, learn how to take data from a Numbers spreadsheet and use it to add new slides to a Keynote presentation. While it takes some programming know-how to build automation tasks like this, it is good to know what is possible.

With Safari 6 and Mountain Lion, users can get system notifications from web pages. Some simple JavaScript can be used for web developers to enable and use these notifications. You must first ask for permission to send notifications to the user, and then can trigger notifications. You can react to the user clicking on them as well. However, they only work while the web page is present.

Learn about the developer tools in Safari. You can view JavaScript error messages, send output to the console, and step through your code using the debugger.

Web developers creating pages specifically for the iPhone can ask for GPS location data on their Web pages with some simply JavaScript. See a basic example that can be used to get the latitude and longitude of the iPhone viewing the Web page.