Re: Scripting Palm Desktop
Re: Scripting Palm Desktop
- Subject: Re: Scripting Palm Desktop
- From: Chris Page <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2001 17:32:19 -0700
nigh on 2001.10.06 11:49 AM, Brennan at email@hidden wrote:
>
Whenever will Palm update the damn dictionary so we don't have to jump through
>
hoops like these?
nigh on 2001.10.06 12:24 PM, Irwin Poche at email@hidden wrote:
>
Probably never. It won't sell any more Palm's which is all they, or any
>
other large company, cares about. But it doesn't stop them from advertising
>
AS support - that does put a few bucks in their pockets.
On the one hand, like it says in the Palm Desktop AS dictionary, scripting
is not officially supported. This was primarily a matter of expediency. At
the time we licensed Claris Organizer from Apple the scripting support was
incomplete and officially unsupported by Claris, and we didn't have time to
do anything about it. Just to be clear, as far as I am aware we don't
mention scripting support in our literature, much less "advertise" it -- we
*do* support attaching scripts to buttons in the UI -- we just don't support
scripting Palm Desktop.
On the other hand, I am very interested in providing good scripting support.
Also, I believe the engineering team recognizes the importance of scripting
support, and so do others within the company. The best thing you can do is
send the message to Palm that scripting support is important to you.
Unfortunately it isn't clear where you could send feedback where it will be
heard, so all I can do is ask those of you who are interested in pursuing
this to try whatever means you have to get your message to Palm. The AS
dictionary mentions the address <email@hidden>. You might try that. I'll
have to ask around and see where that address goes. If I get some time, I
may also forward some of the messages from this list to the marketing guy
for Palm Desktop if people don't mind.
The bad news is that the next release probably won't change much. I did fix
the collision in the dictionary with "text" and a couple of other ambiguous
terms[*]. The good news is that we've had recent engineering discussions in
which AppleEvent and AppleScript support figured prominently as a means to
implement some of the things we'd like to do in the future. No promises, of
course.
Furthermore, I do follow this list when I have time, and you can also feel
free to send specific feedback and bug reports directly to me. Note,
however, that I may not have time to respond, and I won't be able to give
technical support.
[*] Here are the ambiguous dictionary terms I fixed:
Class Property (old => new)
address info label => address label
phone info label => phone label
name info title => title
custom field info title => field title
custom field info text => field text
In fact, if you're handy with a resource editor, you could make these
changes yourself if you really need access to these properties.
--
Chris Page
Mac OS Lead, Palm Desktop
Palm, Inc.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that
one9s work is a giant talking wheel of cheese. - Bertell Russrand