Re: Now I can't get this terminology right, dammit!
Re: Now I can't get this terminology right, dammit!
- Subject: Re: Now I can't get this terminology right, dammit!
- From: Shane Stanley <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 15:59:53 +1000
On 3 Oct 2014, at 1:40 pm, Brian Christmas <email@hidden> wrote:
> but unfortunately when Shane uses terms like 'clue' and 'pretty obvious' he's speaking from someone who has this damn stuff running through his veins
Brian, you seem to be under the misapprehension that this stuff is simple if you know some magic key. It's not, for anyone, or at least anyone I know. There's no magic -- it's a case of working through it, and persisting. Sure, I understand scrolling in text views reasonably well because some of it's relatively fresh in my mind -- I spent nearly a week getting that one thing to work to my complete satisfaction in my own app recently, and that was with the aid of a debugger and many, many hours of reading and re-reading documentation. So when you come in here apoplectic because you can't get what you want in a couple of hours, understand that you might not be generating the level of sympathy you seem to think you're entitled to.
It might be cathartic to lash out at documentation or blame anything else -- everyone does that at some stage, too -- but there comes a point where you either live with the reality, or walk away.
> It's no wonder that it seems very few people actually take up programming in ASObjC, there's so many hurdles!
But why would you expect it to be a walk in the park?
AppleScriptObjC in Xcode gives you access to the Cocoa frameworks, and as such it's a great way to add interfaces to AppleScript scripts. If you have modest ambitions, it can be fairly straight forward. But the frameworks don't magically become any simpler just because AppleScript is involved: they are large and complicated, and some of the APIs can best be described as gnarly and obtuse. Something like a text view is a very complex piece of software that provides an enormous range of functionality -- using it fully is hard work, and you could write a whole book about just that one thing. One of the reasons I only gloss over it in my book is because, honestly, I think that if someone wants to take something of that complexity on, they'd be better to learn Objective-C.
If you want to write full-blown apps, for a variety of reasons, in most cases AppleScriptObjC is just not a good choice. If you want to do that, learn Objective-C or Swift. Then you will have things like a debugger to help you, and lots more resources. And you will also find that it is still damned hard work, and at times every bit as frustrating and undocumented. Go and read the Cocoa mailing lists or look through stackoverflow, and you'll see plenty of examples. It's the nature of the beast, and the range and complexity of the APIs involved. It's programming.
> And so very, very few concrete examples of conversion.
Which is why I keep trying to explain that you need to understand the process, not just expect to find ready-made snippets. If you understand the process, you can do the conversion yourself. There are zillions of methods for which there are no Objective-C examples, either -- that's just the nature of the beast.
--
Shane Stanley <email@hidden>
<www.macosxautomation.com/applescript/apps/>
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