Re: R23's Osaxen Rant (or much too much ado about nihil)
Re: R23's Osaxen Rant (or much too much ado about nihil)
- Subject: Re: R23's Osaxen Rant (or much too much ado about nihil)
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 10:06:47 -0800
On 1/25/01 6:41 AM, "Richard 23" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
Does Akua provide unique must-have tools which extend AppleScript's
>
reach and productivity or does it instead repackage already existing
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functionality, rename existing standard terms, add terms which have
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no effect other than to flag as reserved and pretty format certain
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terms for display...establishing itself as a big fat namespace
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polluter? (How's that for a loaded question?) I don't really know
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so thought I'd do some snooping. At the close of this novel I'm
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still unsure. (Didn't mean to blow the ending...)
Richard,
Akua doesn't just "repackage" what the Finder does and get it to work
outside a Finder tell block. It gets it to WORK, period, when the Finder
often screws up. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've had to
replace Finder code with Akua code or Jon's code to get something to work
reliably. Over and over and over again. I'm incredibly grateful to Akua for
providing working, reliable alternatives to the Finder.
This has happened when I've tried to get the items of a large folder, and
especially for moving, deleting or copying files. It takes the Finder so
long to move or a copy a file that it doesn't yet exist in the new location
when the script moves on, so the script errors.
Just yesterday, I hit a new one. I've made a rather complex script for
someone that automatically unstuffs a folder received in an email
attachment, reads the tab-delimited text files therein, and imports them
into FileMaker Pro. There are all sorts of hurdles along the way. If all
goes well, the text files are stored away and their icons colored green by
the Finder's "label index" setting. If there's some problem, the user is
sent an alert email message and has to go do the whole process manually, and
the file is colored red so he can identify it. He was starting to get these
alert messages every single day, and yet when he'd apply the script to the
original message manually, everything would work fine. I've spent hours and
hours writing debug scripts to track down the error point, with 42 different
error points marked and notated.
Well, guess what? It turns out that the error is caused by the one remaining
Finder command in the script: those label indices. (Actually it errors a
second time when it tries to set the label index to 2 -- red -- after the
first error when it can't set the label index to 6 -- green.) I thought I'd
just have to omit this file-coloring business altogether but - no - it turns
out that Akua can do this too ('label number' of 'extended file info', then
'apply catalog info' which actually works with extended info, although it
says it only works with 'basic info for'.)
So Akua has saved the day again. I often use vanilla AppleScript instead of
Akua's list commands because I find they're faster since AppleScript was
made PowerPC-native, but otherwise I find Akua Sweets a wonderful boon.
You're very lucky if you've never run into situations where Akua is
necessary, is all I can say.
--
Paul Berkowitz