This tutorial is to provide beginners with some general information regarding how to use Smile/SmileLab, and to help them with the basic action in Smile: running a script. Running scripts is how you gain access to SmileLab's unique power and versatility.

The File ▸ New plot... menu is for visualizing data files and the Graphs ▸ Edit Settings menu is for opening the dialog windows to adjust the graph settings. With scripts you can do all that and much more, and in addition scripts are re-usable for ever.

Once a script written, having it perform again the same action is straightforward: you just run the script again. Later it is easy to bring changes to the script, for example to improve the result or to adapt to a new situation.

The tutorial consists in performing some automatic data processing, and displaying customized curves from a set of data files. In a first step, we focus on the basics of AppleScript programming.

If you are visiting the tutorial for the first time, our advice is to view it page by page with the next links, and to run in Smile each example. The first chapter tells you how to proceed.

1. About AppleScript
2. Write a data visualization script