Joe’s iPhoto AppleScripts for Date Manipulation have been updated. I’ve been working on these for a while towards the goals of making Automator actions and a standalone Application, but some unknown incompatibility introduced by iPhoto 5.0.4 pushed this to the front burner.

Some areas of improvement:

• Better UI Date Entry – Dates entered directly in info pane, no more popping the Batch Change window
• Language Independence – All language specific UI calls removed, should work with any language or date format
• Date format sniffing – The date format is now discovered gracefully and checked for accuracy.
• Faster – Extensive refactoring and efficiency tuning, now I can really blame iPhoto for the slowdowns.
• Works with iPhoto 5.0.4 – I’ve been testing it all evening with absolutely no problems (I probably shouldn’t say that)

I still don’t know why the previous scripts stopped working with 5.0.4, but I was thankfully able to get these all working with the newest iPhoto in a few hours this morning. Good application design really does make a difference. I know I’m still not working in true OOP, but breaking the code down into simple, self-contained chunks really makes maintenance simpler. The return curve (that agonizing time spent staring one’s own code and having no idea how it works) is much shorter when each component is named descriptively, has a concise, easy to grasp function and doesn’t draw from anything but it’s explicity input parameters.

Idea for next time: If these scripts obliterated the existing clipboard, would that be a dealbreaker? Or just an annoyance? What if they ran a lot faster?