Re: Barriers to Applescript adoption
Re: Barriers to Applescript adoption
- Subject: Re: Barriers to Applescript adoption
- From: Brennan <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 21:53:33 +0200
There's clearly a bunch of things we can do as a community, and there's certainly a bunch of things Apple can do to lower the barriers.
The most obvious question is this;
Why is ASLG not installed in the Applescript folder as part of the standard Applescript install?
This pdf (as others have mentioned) is one of the best single document language references around. I taught myself the basics of Applescript over a couple of afternoons, just working through it. My only complaint is that so many of its examples target the obsolete 'Scriptable Text Editor' which is tricky to locate.
I think it's absurd that one has to first locate and then download this essential and excellent document, when there is surely enough space for it on the MacOS install CD and almost everyone's hard drive.
The ASLG pdf would go a long way to bringing curious newbies into the fold.
BTW Alex, on the subject of command line Applescript antics, you should certainly check out Smile, which has some very interesting features that should allow you to do what you want using a slightly different paradigm. Smile's 'Text' windows are quite similar to Director's message window, except that output goes to a different window (called 'output', strangely enough) and you have to use the Enter key instead of the return key to execute the line of code.
Even better, you can select several lines in a text window and press Enter and have them all executed at once. This is especially useful with multiline blocks of code.
See what you think!
http://www.tandb.com.au/smile/
I also came to Applescript from Director, and have found the transition more bumpy than the syntax would have suggested superficially. In fact, if I hadn't also played a bit with LISP, I'm not sure that I would have really 'got it', at least, not so quickly.
One great thing is that Applescript has taught me how much better Lingo could be.
Zav, you will come to love Applescript's exception handling and loathe Lingo's useless 'alertHook'. The ability to inline scripts inside each other is also extremely elegant. There are dozens of other areas where I think Applescript is more sophisticated than Lingo, but many of them are quite subtle. Lingo has far better string handling, but when you have Akua installed, you wont look back.
-Brennan