Re: Sending text to frontmost app and active text field
Re: Sending text to frontmost app and active text field
- Subject: Re: Sending text to frontmost app and active text field
- From: KLW <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 13:20:43 -0500
Michael Deninger wrote:
I guess that I am considering the barcode scanner as an input device
just like the keyboard. My "driver" would be an application initially.
Eventually it would become faceless. Would this not be consistent with
expected user interface guidelines?
Regards,
Mike
Will you be using a keystroke of some sort to activate the scanner, or
are you relying on the scanner's buttons to activate your app?
It seems to me that if the user knowingly has to activate your
application, you avoid most of the big issues with inserting text in any
open application.
It dawns on me, by the way, that a way to achive some kind of user
control of the process regardless of how you initiate the scan would be
to simply post the results of the scan to the user's clipboard. You
could do that without using AppleScript; you also wouldn't have to worry
about ensuring that the frontmost app CAN handle text input. Here's what
I would imagine:
A scan is activated
When scan is finished, an notification dialog appears saying something
like "scan is ready for your clipboard", including a preview of the
results of the scan. If the user clicks "OK" the scan results go the
clipboard. If not, results are dropped. This leaves the user in control.
If you think that is too many steps, you could set up a user-defined
preference for the app to automatically insert results onto clipboard
and just post a simple notification whenever it does so.
Convenience can get awfully annoying if you can't be in charge of it
(just think of the nightmarish assistants in Microsoft Word)
K
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