Recipe 38Drive a Mac GUI Using MacRuby and AXElements

Problem

You want to test a Mac GUI, but you don’t want to use a bridge to AppleScript. Instead, you want to use an expressive Ruby-like API that will be easier to write and maintain.

Ingredients

  • AXElements,[251] a Ruby wrapper around the Apple Accessibility APIs

  • A nightly build of MacRuby,[252] an implementation of Ruby tied closely to the OS X runtime

  • Spinach,[253] a Cucumber-like framework that’s compatible with MacRuby

  • Command-Line Tools for Xcode[254] to compile AXElements

Solution

AXElements is an easy-to-use library for Mac GUI automation. Rather than relying on AppleScript like traditional Mac scripting projects do, AXElements calls directly into Apple-provided APIs for interacting ...

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