The title says it all. I’m fed up!

I’ve been AppleScripting things for many years now, and I’ve come to expect some pretty idiosyncratic behavior from AppleScript. Sure, there’s the occasional application that won’t take “whose” or “which” and insists on “where its” instead; or the method that mixes up “true” and “having”; that’s part and parcel of the AppleScript English-like syntax.

But it’s gotten worse.

See, I’ve been trying to script Apple’s Mail application. And, well, it’s pretty damn near impossible to do.

Why? Well, because it’s broken, that’s why. Create an outgoing message, and it has no identifier! Try to classify an incoming message via a rule? Well, it doesn’t have an ID, either.

So, my plans to make a fancy new version of Mail to KGTD with MailTags support built-in, is sort of indefinitely on hold. (And I won’t belabor you with the problems I’ve had getting MailTags scripted, since I’m sure it’s just beta teething pains.)

Then there’s Kinkless GTD itself. It’s a wonderful productivity tool. Agile, responsive, entirely AppleScriptable (heck, it’s almost entirely AppleScript, itself), and a true work of hacker art.

But it’s broken, too…

iCal sync is problematic if you add a PDA to the mix (not Kinkless’ fault, just more of Apple’s broken software) and there’s some bugs which cause tasks to just disappear if you set your dates incorrectly.

And, again, I can’t seem to really get it integrated with Mail. Not cleanly, not easily. It’s a definite case of a square peg in a slightly clogged and not-quite-round hole.

I can’t help but feel that there’s a better way of doing this. Something that doesn’t try to build everything out of an outliner, without any real starting point. Something that doesn’t rely on Apple’s half-baked attempts at software…

Something just a little more… purple…