Chapter 14. Introducing AppleScript Studio

So far throughout this book, you've developed programs that have a simple user interface. You relied on the trustworthy display dialog command to display a message or to get input from the user. As useful as this command is, however, it is very limited in its capabilities. For example, this command only allows one field for data input and cannot display multiple fields of output. In fact, I showed you how to build a list and use the choose from list command to display multiple lines of output in a not-so-straightforward manner.

Certainly, other programs you use on the Mac are friendlier than AppleScript. In fact, the Mac's reputation is based on its user-friendly dialogs and ease of use. It would be great if AppleScript could somehow tap into that paradigm and support interfaces that provide for multiple inputs and outputs and perhaps even show tabular data, images, and so on.