Making my first app! Where to start? Anyone want to help?

[J Walk]

Okay I've always had the idea of making this app. Every summer some friends and I do a fantasy baseball league. It's not Yahoo or ESPN or any of those other online fantasy sites, it's actually our own. But the hard part is that every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the runs and RBI's of each player must be checked at sites like MLB.com or ESPN.com. So essentially, I want to make an app that retrieves the runs and RBI's for each player and displays it, adding up the totals. Anyone think this could be done?

[Equin]

Tasks like this (scraping a website) is probably easiest done with a scripting language like perl, python or maybe even php.

Google for "web scraping", "screen scraping" or maybe even "html scraping".

[J Walk]

Thanks Equin, I'll have to check into that.

[mdmunoz]

Do you know Objective C or any of the Cocoa languages? I ask because you could just use a brief Applescript to run your scraping script and return the results, rather than building a entire application.

You might even set it up to automatically run at specific times via a cron job, and append the results to a file.

[J Walk]

mdmunoz-
an applescript would be a whole lot easier, I'd like to do that instead. I know little programming.

[hungryduck]

you could even just write a nice liddle applescript and then use Platypus (Download Platypus 3.4 for Mac - Platypus - Create application wrappers for shell scripts - Softpedia) to wrap it into an application...