OS X Accessibility Inspector (UIElementInspector) Tool for UI Scripting

Questions & Suggestions
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I played around a bit with UI Browser. Here some (superficial) observations:

  • Basically it gives you the same information as the combination of Accessibility Inspector and the above mentioned AppleScript does give you. That is, you get both terminologies, the technical Accessibility element names and the names for System Events.

  • Sometimes it can go further down the hierarchy. For example, with the font menu in Evernote, the script drills down until pop up button "Font", whereas UI Browser goes two levels deeper (menu 1 > menu item [x]). It can do this because it runs in the background while you are opening the pop up menu.

  • It has some additional convenience features: for example, from the detected elements it can auto-compose the tell block for you. Very handy. Or it can execute UI actions, etc.

  • Sometimes it behaves sluggish. For example when targeting the Reminders application. But Reminders is known to be very slow/buggy when operated by an UI script, so UI Browser’s sluggishness may well serve as an indicator of what you have to expect from your future UI script :wink:

I agree with you: If you do a lot of UI scripting UI Browser is well worth the price. In my case —an occasional UI scripter— it’s a “very nice to have” tool and I’m not sure if I will buy it.

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