Topic by king gamer222 2014-09-19 03:33:00

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Hi all. I want to know if I can make my life easier and write a CLI for the Mac App Store. I want it to be able to search, install, and update. Maybe remove if I'm up to it. So what, if any, is a good starting point? Which language would be best tailored to this task?

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Reply by Ethin 2014-09-22 00:28:32

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@king gamer222, you've got a problem here. The Mac App Store is written in Objective-C/Objective-C++, so you'd have to learn that. Also, I don't know how the app store works, and probably won't ever know, so I can't tell you how you'd do that. Don't try. Just use the graphical version. If you do attempt to write a CLI interface, I would recommend you ask apple for permission first.

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Reply by SLJ 2014-10-02 11:39:14

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Hi.
You might take a look at Apple scripting, where you can work with most tasks which are build into Apples OS.

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Reply by camlorn 2014-10-02 15:11:55

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I don't think this is easily possible.  I do not believe that public APIs exist for it.  They might, but I doubt it.  Especially since I could then write a virus that went and started buying apps for you.
That said, you could use something like selenium, a Python package for crawling the web.  Other languages have equivalents.  Technically speaking, anything on the web can have a CLI version, if only because you're starting up a headless browser and clicking on links.  But you're screwed when the web site changes, and this isn't exactly newbie-friendly programming either.

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