Re: Dropping text on to Droplets
Re: Dropping text on to Droplets
- Subject: Re: Dropping text on to Droplets
- From: Brennan Young <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2001 23:12:13 +0200
- Organization: Magic Lantern
altenburg <email@hidden> wrote
>
Didn't follow the entire thread, but from the above I'd gather that you want
>
to accept text or pictures to have them processed.
Right. Well, anything that can be dragged and dropped between applications
really. I suppose that's just pictures, text and movie clippings.
I got a couple of private mails following up on this too. One suggested using
'oneClick' and another saying that other kinds of shell are possible, but that
Apple only provides a droplet which accepts files. I suppose oneClick and iBuild
are 'kinds of shell' too.
Well, I got to thinking a bit more about it, and have been trying to use a
folder action. I came up against a problem though.
When I drag some text into the folder, a clipping is created, but the folder
action does not always run until I manually activate the Finder. I even tried
activating the Finder specifically in the script, but the script does not run
because the Finder is not active (duh).
Here's my script:
on adding folder items to ThisFolder after receiving theDroppedFiles
beep
tell application "Finder"
activate
end tell
set i to item 1 of theDroppedFiles
display dialog (i as string)
end adding folder items to
Just to be clear, you should attach this to a folder, then open an application
such as Quicktime Player or Tex Edit Plus and drag 'something' (a block of text
or a frame of video) onto the open folder.
I would expect the script to run automatically. Strangely enough, I find it runs
automatically when I drag a clipping from Quicktime Player, but not when I drag
text from (say) Tex Edit Plus or the email composer I am typing in right now.
Dragging an image out of Netscape activates the script ok. Why not text? Is this
a bug?
I'll also look into the other solutions (iBuild and oneClick), but I was hoping
for a vanilla solution. I really like the principles of drag and drop, and I
think it could be harnessed a great deal more by Applescript if something like
this were standard.
Can we attach folder actions to the Desktop Folder?
Any other ideas are welcome.
--
_____________
Brennan