AXElements is a DSL abstraction built on top of the Mac OS X Accessibility and CGEvent APIs that allows code to be written in a very natural and declarative style that describes user interactions.

The framework is optimized for writing tests that require automatic GUI manipulation, whether it be finding controls on the screen, typing, clicking, or other ways in which a user can interact with the computer.

Perhaps you want to do something with the finder. This example opens a new Finder window, goes to the Applications directory, quick looks the first app and then opens the application:

    require 'rubygems'
    require 'ax_elements'

    finder = Accessibility.application_with_bundle_identifier 'com.apple.finder'
    set_focus finder

    menu = finder.menu_bar_item(title: 'File')
    press menu
    press menu.menu_item(title: 'New Finder Window')
    sleep 1 # otherwise everything happens as fast as possible

    window = finder.main_window
    click window.outline.row(static_text: { value: 'Applications' })
    press window.toolbar.button(description: 'Quick Look')
    sleep 1

    press finder.quick_look.button(identifier: 'QLControlOpen')

A simpler example would be changing the system volume by moving the slider in the menu bar:

    require 'rubygems'
    require 'AXElements'

    ui = Accessibility.application_with_bundle_identifier 'com.apple.systemuiserver'
    volume = ui.menu_extra(description: 'system sound volume')

    click volume
    15.times { decrement volume.slider }
    15.times { increment  volume.slider }

The documentation is the best place to get started, it will help you get steup and includes a few tutorials with examples. Documentation is hosted by rdoc.info, but you can also generate it yourself using YARD.

Documentation is stored in the docs/ directory, but the documentation includes a number of cross references and even some pictures so you will lose a lot of the quality if you view them as plain text. You can view the generated documentation at rdoc.info.

If you want to jump ahead, you can install AXElements from rubygems:

    # If you use MacRuby with RVM
    gem install AXElements

    # If you don't use MacRuby with RVM
    sudo macgem install AXElements

• Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet
• Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it
• Fork the project
• Start a feature/bugfix branch
• Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution
• Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
• Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.

Copyright (c) 2010-2011 Marketcircle Incorporated. All rights reserved.

AXElements is available under the standard 3-clause BSD license. See LICENSE.txt for further details.