Re: Panther Script Menu - being interfered with by ABook and DVD Player
Re: Panther Script Menu - being interfered with by ABook and DVD Player
- Subject: Re: Panther Script Menu - being interfered with by ABook and DVD Player
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 09:02:19 -0800
On 10/31/03 7:01 AM, "Diggory Laycock" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
Has anyone else noticed the rather odd behaviour of the new Address
>
Book and DVD Player's interaction with the Script menu?
>
>
http://www.monkeyfood.com/blog/archives/000040.html
What the Monkey who wrote that piece seems completely unaware of is that
scripts in script menus belonging to applications run MUCH FASTER than
scripts in the system's script menu. That's because scripts run by
applications have their own application as the "current application" and
don't have to queue up to send slow inter-application Apple Events to the
application - they just execute them - fast. So if most of the application
commands you'll be sending are to that application, you're much better off
having an application script menu than using the system menu, which is run
by System Events app and has to send Apple Events to all other apps.
Furthermore, this has not changed in OS 10.3. All the carbonized apps which
had script menus back in OS 9 (e.g. Entourage, Tex-Edit Plus) brought their
script menus with them to OS 10.1 and 10.2. And I believe Eudora introduced
a script menu for the first time in OS X. You'd be a fool not to use them
and to instead use the system menu. The only new thing in OS 10.3 is that a
few of the Apple apps have introduced their own script menus to gain the
same advantage, which is great news for those apps. I haven't played around
with it to discover the "interference" that the Monkey hit - that would be
too bad. I would have thought that the best implementation would be to allow
you to still put scripts directed at any app - including Address Book and
DVD Player - into the "universal" main /Library/Scripts/ and
~/Library/Scripts/ folders to be run (slowly) from other apps whenever you
want, and to have the app-specific scripts still located in the
Applications/ThisApp subfolder of the same folders, but now to run quickly
from the app-specific menu.
In a word, I think that this webpage illustrates the the fact that being
able to make a nice webpage/blog is no substitute for knowledge. The
anonymous author of teh Monkey page should take down the page and learn
something about AppleScript before sounding off. His (her?) main objection
seems to be about the aesthetics of the system script menu (it now looks
"ugly"). Give me a break.
The new script menus are an excellent advance. Even better will be when they
all introduce user-defined app-specific keyboard shortcuts (as Mail has
done, and as Entourage and Tex-Edit Plus have long had). Then you won't be
troubled by having to look into the "ugly" submenu in the scripts folder
(which of course you don't have even now if you use the app-specific script
menu).
--
Paul Berkowitz
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