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Re: What do we know about Scriptarian?
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Re: What do we know about Scriptarian?


  • Subject: Re: What do we know about Scriptarian?
  • From: has <email@hidden>
  • Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2016 16:15:42 +0000

Deivy Petrescu wrote:
Phil, I bought it.
My goal now it is to quickly convert an AS to a Scriptarian script.
If I can accomplish this, I’ll be putting more information for all.

While I could say how far it can take you, I'd much rather you arrive at your own. Just don't judge it on a toy script though, like ScriptingBridge and JXA, it'll do trivial stuff; it's only when you begin to press these "alternatives" that they start to show their real flaws: missing features, application incompatibilities, poor documentation, confusing behaviors.

(This is why I tell anyone who's serious about doing non-trivial or pro Automation not to even bother with SB/JXA, and to stick to AS no matter how they hate it cos it's the _only_ supported option that _always_ works.)

It is swift based, and I am fighting wth the conversion process.
The environment seems well thought, it show errors on the fly.
It scans all the apps in your computer to see which one are “scriptarian” aps.
QT7  was among the ones it was not, although it is scriptable.
PDF Pen pro, version 5.9.9 (then I have is also not a scriptarian “app”.

Similar for me and at least one other person who commented on it: I found it didn't detect most of my Adobe and MS apps. Did wonder if it was because they were in folders, but then I saw it had found Acrobat so I don't think it's that. Might be author did something foolish like looking for .sdef files directly in the .app bundle (wrong!) or, I think, a very likely answer is that it can't cope at all with imperfect application dictionaries—especially those from Carbon-based apps (which most of these are) as they tend to be more variable and quirky due to their entire scripting support being manually implemented, whereas Cocoa apps use CocoaScripting.framework to provide scriptability.

It has a nice help page and some examples, but you have to know Swift.

If you had/could borrow an iPad you could trot through the Swift Playgrounds tutorials. No idea if it'd be worth it for you; it's basics like variables, values, loops & conditionals which you'll know.

If people here _really_ wanted a "5 minute guide to Swift for AS users", you can club together to arrange a bribe and I'll write one. (Club together a big enough bribe, it might even fit into 5 minutes!:)

...

When you're done with Scriptarian, let me know. I must finish the tutorial first, but then I'd like you to give SwiftAutomation a spin to see how it compares. It's pure AppleScript behavior under Swift syntax; it uses standard SDEF dictionary files for app documentation (only names are changed); there's even an app for translating AS commands to equivalent Swift syntax. As an AS veteran, hopefully you'll be able to tell how it matches up to AS in terms of feature equivalence and compatiblity with all scriptable apps available today (and, let's hope, tomorrow too!).


Cheers

has


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