Re: Where is Script Menu?
Re: Where is Script Menu?
- Subject: Re: Where is Script Menu?
- From: Timothy Bates <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2001 01:11:55 +1000
>
> At 15:21 -0700 10/6/2001, John W Baxter wrote:
>
>>> Note that the ScriptMenu was one of those hacks that was met with violent
>
>>> condemnation from the human interface group, which is why it is an
>
>>> unsupported download and not part of the product.
>
on 10/6/01 6:54 PM, Michael Grant at email@hidden wrote:
>
> So does the HIG prefer ScriptRunner (X-P) or no convenient access to
>
> scripts at all?
On 8/10/01 12:38 AM, "Bill Cheeseman" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
Various Apple-source developer documents and comments from Apple engineers on
>
developer mailing lists suggest that the menu bar extras are intended to be
>
limited to control of hardware only ... The new official HI user interface for
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menus that used to appear in Mac OS 9 menu bar icons or Mac OS X Dock Extras
>
is the application menu that a developer can install in an application's Dock
>
icon.
The first HI claim (that menu bar extras ought to be hardware related and
few in number is arguable). This second notion is, to be blunt, nonsensical.
The point of menu-bar installations is that they are omnipresent. If they
are present only for people who have a particular app, configured in such
and such a way, and have that app running, they may as well not exist,
especially if that app is something like script debugger which not even the
majority of this lists members own.
It is clear that these things should not proliferate. The best solution
would have been to have installed a contextual script menu at the end of
every carbon apps menu list (just like Entourage and tex-edit install for
themselves). This way I would not be looking at an apple menu bar extra AND
a tex-edit script menu item.
Sans this, the menu bar extra is an excellent solution, and one which we
should applaud by sending e-mail to apple saying what a powerful idea it is
and how we support it before the HI guys, who should know better, kill it
without a sensible replacement. There are sensible alternatives, but
anything to do the with dock is not one of them.
Regarding possible alternatives, one might think of the (omnipresent but not
particularly obvious) "services" menu-item of the Application-name menu.
Against this, Services are too buried, too often disabled (in older carbon
apps), and script menu is more than just a service to the current app.
Possibly an item could be added to the AppleMenu, where it could simply be
called "scripts"
Script runner was a non starter. If used it was obtrusive, and nobody used
it. Menu bar extras is cool, but possibly overkill if Apple are not going ot
make this a basic system for themselves to extend the system (and thus
justify its real estate claim on all users menu bars). But SOMETHING like
this has to exist.
Tim