macOS programming environment advice

[lajh_seeiles]

I am a seasoned programmer in "classical" unix systems in all various programming languages (but c/c++ are my preferences), but have not been conducted GUI programming in the windows and mac environment. I would therefore very much appreciate a few starting points.

What I would like to achieve is to write an application that
- extracts entries from the microsoft outlook environment (tasks and calendar items)
- conduct analysis of the above
- present text and graphical analysis

it would be helpful if I could tie it to the outlook environment as an outlook plugin one way or the other.

Can anyone give me suggestions on what environments and general advice on the generic approach (specifically how to extract the outlook entries).

Again, I am not looking for a long specific detailed responses, more experienced advice where I can start looking (it seems that there are several approaches, and I am looking for your advice).

Thanks in advance.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

Doesn't office have some scripting capabilities (IDK, I don't use it.) I would think that would be the ideal and easiest thing to use.

 

[lajh_seeiles]

It does have some scripting abilities, but the analyses I am planning to do are non-trivial and beyond the capabilities of the scripting language (or it would stretch the scripting capabilities beyond what I believe they were intended for). That is why I want to end up doing the analysis in a C where I have libraries and my own previous math functions defined).

 

[chown33]

It does have some scripting abilities, but the analyses I am planning to do are non-trivial and beyond the capabilities of the scripting language (or it would stretch the scripting capabilities beyond what I believe they were intended for). That is why I want to end up doing the analysis in a C where I have libraries and my own previous math functions defined).

Can you get the data you want from scripting? If so, you can then write it to text files (or whatever), and carry out the analysis using any other tool, including ones you write in C.

If you haven't yet looked at what data is available to AppleScript from Outlook, you should start with that. To do that, open the Script Editor, then from its File menu choose "Open Dictionary" and choose MS Outlook from the resulting list of apps. Examine the classes and their members. If you have questions about them, post again with a specific question.

If all the data you want is available via scripting, then that seems like a simpler approach. Otherwise you'd have to resort to parsing the Outlook files yourself, which implies you have accurate info on their format, or you'll be forced to write a plugin. That seems like a lot of effort if a few dozen lines of AppleScript could have extracted all the required data.

EDIT
It looks like recent Outlook versions support JavaScript as a scripting language. Recent OS X versions also have this, so if you know JS that could be useful in getting started.
https://developer.apple.com/library...criptForAutomation/Articles/Introduction.html

 

[lajh_seeiles]

Can you get the data you want from scripting? If so, you can then write it to text files (or whatever), and carry out the analysis using any other tool, including ones you write in C.

If you haven't yet looked at what data is available to AppleScript from Outlook, you should start with that. To do that, open the Script Editor, then from its File menu choose "Open Dictionary" and choose MS Outlook from the resulting list of apps. Examine the classes and their members. If you have questions about them, post again with a specific question.

If all the data you want is available via scripting, then that seems like a simpler approach. Otherwise you'd have to resort to parsing the Outlook files yourself, which implies you have accurate info on their format, or you'll be forced to write a plugin. That seems like a lot of effort if a few dozen lines of AppleScript could have extracted all the required data.

EDIT
It looks like recent Outlook versions support JavaScript as a scripting language. Recent OS X versions also have this, so if you know JS that could be useful in getting started.
https://developer.apple.com/library...criptForAutomation/Articles/Introduction.html

Thanks, I am going to look into that.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

Thanks, I am going to look into that.

Didn't you say you wanted this to be cross platform between OS X and Windows? Chown's solution sounds very OS X focused to me - I would expect moving the solution to Windows later would be rather difficult.

 

[Mikael H]

I am a seasoned programmer in "classical" unix systems in all various programming languages (but c/c++ are my preferences), but have not been conducted GUI programming in the windows and mac environment. I would therefore very much appreciate a few starting points.

What I would like to achieve is to write an application that
- extracts entries from the microsoft outlook environment (tasks and calendar items)
- conduct analysis of the above
- present text and graphical analysis

it would be helpful if I could tie it to the outlook environment as an outlook plugin one way or the other.

Can anyone give me suggestions on what environments and general advice on the generic approach (specifically how to extract the outlook entries).

Again, I am not looking for a long specific detailed responses, more experienced advice where I can start looking (it seems that there are several approaches, and I am looking for your advice).

Thanks in advance.

Just my $.02:
Take a step back and think about whether you want your product to be Outlook-specific, or if you'd rather communicate with mail/calendar servers directly. I'm no expert here, but https://launchpad.net/openmapi/ looks like one way to make the product more generic...

 

[lajh_seeiles]

Just my $.02:
Take a step back and think about whether you want your product to be Outlook-specific, or if you'd rather communicate with mail/calendar servers directly. I'm no expert here, but https://launchpad.net/openmapi/ looks like one way to make the product more generic...

Thank you Mikael! Will do.