How to fire MacOS notifications with AppleScript and Scala

Summary: This tutorial demonstrates how to fire macOS system notifications with AppleScript and Scala (or Java).

In this article it helps if you already know a little bit about AppleScript, though that’s not completely necessary. Near the end of the tutorial I show how to invoke the AppleScript code using Scala, so feel free to skip down to there if you just want to see that — you can always read the stuff at the top for reference later.

A “Hello, world” MacOS AppleScript notification

To get started, here’s the code for a basic “Hello, world” AppleScript notification:

display notification "Hello, world"

The code looks like this in the AppleScript Editor:

Running this code creates a notification in the MacOS Notification Center that looks like this:

If you’re comfortable writing AppleScript, this part is straightforward.

AppleScript: Mac notification with a sound

You can add sounds to your notifications by adding the sound name command, like this:

display notification "Hello, world" sound name "default"

With this code, the notification window looks the same as before, and you’ll also hear a sound when it’s displayed. I don’t like the default sound, so I dug around and found that you can use the names of sounds in the /System/Library/Sounds folder. I have these sounds on my current OS X 10.9 system:

Basso.aiff     -- good, but error-like (low keys on keyboard)
Blow.aiff      -- good
Bottle.aiff    -- too short
Frog.aiff      -- chirp
Funk.aiff      -- thud
Glass.aiff     -- good (like the end of a timer)
Hero.aiff      -- good
Morse.aiff     -- 'pop'
Ping.aiff      -- good
Pop.aiff       -- shorter 'pop'
Purr.aiff      -- good
Sosumi.aiff    -- good
Submarine.aiff -- good
Tink.aiff      -- too quiet

Just use the first part of each file name to trigger the desired sound. For instance, the “Purr” sound is good, so my notification code looks like this:

display notification "Hello, world" sound name "Purr"

You can see the sounds available on your system with this ls command (using the Terminal):

ls /System/Library/Sounds

How to add a title and subtitle to your notification

You can also add a title and subtitle to your notifications. For example, this AppleScript code:

display notification "Hello, world" with title "Hello" subtitle "world"

yields this notification:

You can add sound name to that command as well.

Running from Scala (or Java)

A great thing is that you can run AppleScript scripts from Scala and Java as well. The process looks like this:

// define your applescript command
val command = """display notification "Hello, world" with title "Scala" sound name "Purr" """

// run the command
val runtime = Runtime.getRuntime
val code = Array("osascript", "-e", command)
val process = runtime.exec(code)

With MacOS 10.14.5 and Scala 2.12.8 the notification looks like this:

Those lines of code are simple, so you can easily test them from the Scala REPL:

There are other ways to do this, but I’ve had problems getting those approaches to run without errors on different MacOS versions, so at the moment, I use this approach in my AppleScriptUtils project.

I originally tested this technique on Mac OS X 10.10 using Scala 2.11, and it still works in 2019 with MacOS 10.14.5 and Scala 2.12.8. (No import statements are required.)

See also

This link on Apple’s website is a good place to start looking for more information. Just search for “notification” on that page, and follow the links.

Summary

If you’re comfortable with Mac OS X programming, you may also know that you can run commands like this from the Unix shell. I show how to run AppleScript from the Unix command line and Unix scripts in these two articles:

• Use AppleScript to display a dialog from the Mac OS X Unix shell
• How to run an AppleScript from the Mac Unix shell

In summary, if you were looking for an example of how to trigger a notification in the Mac OS X notification center using AppleScript, I hope this has been helpful.