Switched my parents to a Mac – mom missed the “Slideshow” button…

A while back I convinced my parents to switch to a Mac. There were some teething issues, but for the most part, they were eventually fine with it. But, my mom missed one “feature” of Windows – the “Slideshow” button in the Explorer toolbar. She would go to a folder of photos my dad saved in the “shared” area and hit the button. She could navigate OS X’s finder, but it was too many keyboard presses, clicks and things to remember to achieve a similar result with preview.

A quick look around and this started my AppleScript writing experience…

Turned out to be really easy. I couldn’t figure one part out, posted in the Apple support forum and had an answer to the one hangup I was having in less than a day.

tell application "System Events"
   tell process "Finder"
     set frontmost to true -- was missing this bit
     keystroke "a" using {command down} --Selects all in the finder pane
     keystroke " " using {option down} --Starts preview in fullscreen mode
   end tell
end tell

Saved it as an application, put a “Play” icon on it, and dragged it to the toolbar. Mom happy…