If someone only needs quick and dirty solutions for some tasks to automate: AppleScript, KeyQuencer, Folder Watcher and Okey Dokey make an excellent combo to let the Mac do some stuff unattended that usually needs user interaction. KeyQuencer can wait for some specific window to come to front, it can also execute AppleScript code AND it comes with an OSAX to let you implement KeyQuencer capabilities into AppleScript commands. Folder Watcher just sits in the background an looks what happens to the contents of a directory. Under some preset trigger condition FolderWatcher may just execute some AppleScript program. Want to have some folder actions like printing stuff that was dropped into a folder? With the appropriate setup it works like a charm, but with 7.1 (or above), yet! Many programs are more or less scriptable, with their own simple scripting language (for example little ZTerm or big Excel) or they just support AppleScript.

P.S.: for HyperTalk language there are two different kinds of additional code snippets to extend the ressource fork of a HyperCard stack: external command "XCMD" and external function "XFCN". For AppleScript there is a folder inside the System Folder to hold the OSAX scripting additions for AppleScript. Plenty of useful and funny extensions are available, even in well sorted collections. I would encourage anyone who is setting first steps into Mac programming to explore such sources for well tested and fully operational code. To get a thing like SerialHandler to work as expected under any circumstance might turn out to be quite difficult if you are new to an IDE like Think Pascal.