The Idle Handler

One purpose of automation is to make your life easier by freeing you from the drudgery of executing repetitive tasks. Using AppleScript, you can create special “assistants” that perform tasks for you throughout the day, such as monitoring a project’s status, checking specific Web sites and servers for updates, or creating daily and hourly reports.

Scripts designed to perform repeated actions over time are often implemented as stay-open AppleScript applications, or applets. To perform an action at timed intervals, these applets use a special subroutine called an idle handler.