I wish Apple would follow its own advice
I wish Apple would follow its own advice
- Subject: I wish Apple would follow its own advice
- From: Michelle Steiner <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2005 08:52:16 -0700
A while back, Christopher Nebel gave us a link to guidelines for
writing scriptable applications.
<http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2106.html>
I wish that Apple's software designers would follow those guidelines.
For instance:
Scripting the Selection
The selection, in scripting terms, refers only to selected model
objects. Do not attempt to represent the selection in dialog boxes.
Not all applications need to support scripting the selection – for
some very simple ones, such as control panel-like applications, it
may not be meaningful.
<snip>
The selection property
<snip>
Multiple selections in one window
Some applications have multiple views in one window, each with its
own selection. For example, viewer windows in Mail can have as many
as three selections: the selected mailboxes, the selected messages
within that mailbox, and the selected text within a message. Only one
of them should have focus, and this determines the value of the
selection property for the application and the window as a whole. (If
you have trouble determining where the focus is, think of it as “if
I select Cut or Copy, what data will go onto the clipboard?”) In
such cases, you should add additional “selected thing” elements to
get at the various sub-selections. For example, Mail would define
the element types selected mailbox, selected message, and selected text.
another example:
Provide good error messages.
Cocoa Scripting’s default error messages are written in generic
programmerese (such as “NSReceiverEvaluationScriptError: 4”)
rather than specific English (such as “Can’t get window 17”). As
of Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), you can set your own error numbers and
messages by calling [NSScriptCommand currentCommand] and then calling
-setScriptErrorNumber: and -setScriptErrorString: on the returned
object. See the NSScriptCommand documentation for further details.
Admittedly, this is only for Panther and beyond, but when they
rewrote applications for Panther, they could have implemented this
suggestion too.
-- Michelle
--
The problem with political jokes is that too many of them get elected.
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