Apple

The answer from Apple :

”This issue behaves as intended based on the following:

Each ‘tell’ sends an AppleEvent, asynchronously, and when Finder or our own app receive that event they do a SetFrontProcess() on themselves. So, depending on which order they actually get received and handled, either Finder or the current app could get be in front.

If you change the script so that it has to get something back from Finder, thus insuring that Finder has finished processing the activate event

So that would mean like this:

on getFrontmostAppName()

tell application "System Events"

set frontmostName to item 1 of (get name of processes whose frontmost is true)

end tell

return frontmostName

end getFrontmostAppName

tell application "Finder"

activate

get window 1

set thisAppName to my getFrontmostAppName()

end tell

return thisAppName

--> "Script Editor"

What nonsense.

Curiously, though, this now seems to be working here (10.10.2):

tell application "Mail"

activate

display dialog "Hello"

end tell

--
Shane Stanley <email@hidden>
<www.macosxautomation.com/applescript/apps/>