Why do we need rb-appscript? Well, because I prefer not to write a bunch of '/usr/bin/osascript/ -e "tell application \"MyApp\" to blah bla bla"' from Ruby to talk to other applications. Rb-appscript enables us to communicate with scriptable applications through Ruby instead of using AppleScript. It is very, very cool and if you are needing to script applications then I suggest you try it. My many thanks to Hamish Sanderson for creating it! Click here for more information.

sudo gem install rb-appscript

This snippet on how to install rb-appscript was taken from Downloading and Installing Appscript for Ruby, an article by Matt Neuburg. If you are not familiar with rb-appscript, and even if you are, I highly recommend reading Matt's article. You will most likely learn something!

Presumably you're already up and running with Ruby. Although rb-appscript is available as a Ruby gem, I prefer manual installation from source. Obtain the latest build from RubyForge. The file you want to download is the source .zip file. (At the time of writing, it was called "rb-appscript-0.5.1.zip.") Unzip the archive, cd into the unzipped directory in the Terminal, and type:

$ ruby extconf.rb
$ make
$ sudo make install

To test, use your favorite Unix script-running environment, and create and execute this script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require "appscript"
include Appscript
puts app('Finder').name.get