Driving named apps

Apple's own apps are well scripted. Reaching for the UI on one of these is doing it the hard way.

Is it scriptable?

sdef /System/Applications/Mail.app | head -60
sdef /Applications/Foo.app | grep -i "<command"

Nothing useful back means the app has no dictionary and you go to layer 3.

The ones that work well

# Safari
chewie run 'tell application "Safari" to get URL of front document'
chewie run 'tell application "Safari" to open location "https://example.com"'
chewie run 'tell application "Safari" to do JavaScript "document.title" in front document'
# ^ needs Develop > Allow JavaScript from Apple Events, off by default

# Mail
chewie run 'tell application "Mail" to get subject of messages 1 thru 5 of inbox'

# Notes
chewie run 'tell application "Notes" to get body of note 1'

# Messages
chewie run 'tell application "Messages" to send "hi" to buddy "+13104296285"'
# ^ outbound. Confirm with the user first.

# Calendar / Reminders / Music / Finder all have dictionaries too
chewie run 'tell application "Music" to play'
chewie run 'tell application "Finder" to get name of every item of desktop'

JXA when you want real data structures back:

chewie run --js 'JSON.stringify(Application("Notes").notes().slice(0,5).map(n => n.name()))'

Reading is usually faster from the file

For history and search, skip the app entirely.

sqlite3 "file:$HOME/Library/Messages/chat.db?mode=ro" \
  "SELECT datetime(date/1000000000 + 978307200,'unixepoch','localtime'), text
   FROM message ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 20"

Two things bite: the Apple epoch is 2001, not 1970, and on Ventura and later text is often NULL because bodies moved to attributedBody as a hex-encoded blob. See docs/05-DATA-LAYER.md.

Other stores: Safari ~/Library/Safari/History.db, Photos ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/database/Photos.sqlite, Calendar ~/Library/Calendars/Calendar.sqlitedb. All need Full Disk Access. All read-only.

Shortcuts

shortcuts list
shortcuts run "Daily Digest"
echo "text" | shortcuts run "Process Text"

Reaches things AppleScript no longer does. Pre-warm required: a shortcut touching a protected resource prompts on first run, and nothing can answer that prompt headless. Have the user run it once by hand, answer Always Allow, confirm it runs clean from the terminal, then call it.

MCP servers for Apple apps

Installed by install.sh: macos-automator-mcp gives you AppleScript and JXA as MCP tools with a callable script knowledge base. Worth adding when the task needs them:

• supermemoryai/apple-mcp: Notes, Contacts, Mail, Messages, Reminders, Calendar, Maps
• carterlasalle/mac_messages_mcp: iMessage with the attributedBody decode handled
• achiya-automation/safari-mcp: 97 Safari tools, keeps the user's logins

Electron apps have none of this

Slack, Discord, Notion, Spotify, VS Code, Figma. No dictionary, no useful data file. Go to layer 3, and remember they need chewie see --force-ax first.

Failure signatures