I'm trying to make an Applescript that will open a file on a user's computer without knowing the hard drive or user name, presuming the file is in the same place in the user directory.
tell application "Finder" to open "/Users/jim/Dropbox/Getting Started.pdf" as POSIX file
works great, whereas
tell application "Finder" to open "~/Dropbox/Getting Started.pdf" as POSIX file
fails.
Is there any way to accomplish this simply?
You can't use tilde paths in AppleScript basically because POSIX file is in fact an URL. URLs for file paths doesn't support incremental paths, only absolute paths. But the meaning of the tilde in POSIX paths is not something special, it's just replaced by the home folder. SO to get the same results we only need to change your code to:
tell application "Finder" to open (POSIX path of (path to home folder)) & "Dropbox/Getting Started.pdf" as POSIX file