Re: Specifying OS X/9 versions of an app [LONG] [WAS: Re: why won't this compile?]
Re: Specifying OS X/9 versions of an app [LONG] [WAS: Re: why won't this compile?]
- Subject: Re: Specifying OS X/9 versions of an app [LONG] [WAS: Re: why won't this compile?]
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2001 00:35:05 -0800
On 12/29/01 12:02 AM, I wrote:
>
On 12/28/01 11:00 PM, "Donald S. Hall" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> Is there any way to ensure that the correct version of an app is selected
>
> without having to resort to 'choose application'?
>
>
The one sure way is to to use the path to the application file.
Actually, as you can see further down the discussion, that's not actually
true, which is what's fascinating. I shouldn't have said so above, and had
forgotten the whole story. If neither version of the application is open,
even having the full path to the application file and saying
tell application "OS X HD:Applications:Microsoft Entourage"
will still open the Classic version if that's the one the system remembers
as 'application "Microsoft Entourage"', or vice versa. That can be very
annoying and puzzling. Something in the system just interprets the 'tell
application' construct as 'tell application "Microsoft Entourage" and opens
the one it likes, no matter if you put in the path to the other one! But
the Finder gets it right, when you give it either the saved application
(saved from 'choose application') to open, as I did, or the full alias path
to open. That works too:
tell application Finder to open alias "OS X HD:Applications:Microsoft
Entourage"
Once you're sure it's open then you can tell it by variable with 'using
terms from' and it won't try to open the other version.
Sorry I got that bit wrong above, but it's so counter-intuitive and against
what we always found before these OS X apps that I really had to go over the
ground again to recall everything.
--
Paul Berkowitz