AppleScript to toggle screensaver security access

Just as I was leaving the office today, a co-worker of mine provided me with an AppleScript challenge… He had a great idea for a tiny little script that would make his life (and mine, as I suffer from the same annoyance) easier.

Both Cory and I use Apple PowerBooks at work that we take home in the evenings. While at work, it’s nice to have the screensaver require a password to re-activate access to the system. But at home, this requirement quickly becomes burdensome. This feature is controlled by a check box buried in the Security pane of System Preferences, and it’s really a pain to manually toggle this check box twice a day. So Cory said it would be nice to have a script that would effortlessly toggle this check box with a click of a button. Allowing convenient toggling of a significant OS X security measure.

The script below does just that. If you’re interested, I suggest you download the script and save it to /Library/Scripts/ where you will be able to access it easliy from the Mac OS X Script Menu up in the menubar.

This script requires either Mac OS X Panther or Tiger, and also that you enable access for assistive devices in your Accessibility Preference Pane. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry… the script will guide you through enabling that feature if it’s not turned on already.

tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    set current pane to pane "Security"
    tell application "System Events"
        try
            tell application process "System Preferences"
                tell window "Security"
                    click checkbox 1
                end tell
            end tell
            tell application "System Preferences" to close the first window
        on error
            tell application "System Preferences"
                activate
                set current pane to pane "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
                display dialog "UI element scripting is not enabled. Check \"Enable access for assistive devices\""
            end tell
        end try
    end tell
end tell