Here's a challenge please read and help.......

Question

I work for a company of a 1000 people and the owners bought everyone an ipod.
the problem is that my boss wants me to record each persons serial number to their ipod and print it out for his records.
i know that the serial number is on the back of the unit but that would take to long.
I also know that when its plugged into the ipod updater program the serial number also shows.
I would like to know if someone can build me a script that would grab the serial number to each ipod i plug in to the updater (maybe bash script, grab from string) copy it to the clip board and paste it to a text edit document. ohh and also a dialog box so i can write the persons name down. and if that can be added to the document as well.
Sincerely
an over worked employee.

Answer 1

If you still have the boxes handy, check to see if the S/N is printed on with a barcode. If so you can just zap those all in with a reader and be done with it in minutes.
Otherwise, to fish that string out of Updater first you must launch Apps/AppleScript/AppleScript Utility.app and check Enable GUI Scripting (enter an admin pass), then you can run this script…
click here to open this script in your editor<pre style="font-family: 'Monaco', 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; overflow:auto; color: #222; background: #DDD; padding: 0.2em; font-size: 10px; width:400px">tell application "System Events" to tell process "iPod Updater" to set an_sn to the value of static text 6 of group 1 of window 1
tell application "TextEdit"
activate
set a_name to the text returned of (display dialog "Enter a name for iPod " & an_sn default answer "")
if the length of (get documents) is less than 1 then make new document
tell (a reference to the front document's text) to set contents to contents & an_sn & tab & a_name & return
end tell</pre>Edit