Re: AppleScript

[STEVE.M@AppleLink.Apple.COM (Carbon-based, S Mitchell,APD)]

[ FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN APPLEEVENTS, FRONTIER OR QUICKEYS: ]
 
> > > [ Bill St. Clair: ]
> > > MCL 2.0 does not have any high level AppleScript specific support.
> > [ Rich Parker: ]
> > Having this capability would enable us to write applications that
> > can be controlled by Frontier, Apple Event QuickKeys, etc.
> [ Howard Oakley: ]
> There is nothing as far as I am aware that prevents you from writing
> MCL apps which can be driven just fine from Frontier - or am I
> missing something?  MCP apps can happily send AEvents, and inserting
> an AEvent event handler in the chain should be fairly straightforward,
> is it not?
I love answering Howard's rhetorical questions (he's British, ya kno').
All this IAC (inter application communication) takes place via
AppleEvents which as Howard says MCL supports now.
 
Frontier took me 3 days to learn thoroughly and by then I didn't like
it much; I couldn't get my 12-year old computer whiz nephew interested
in it which is a bad sign. Frontier is very cumbersome to use; and
system-level scripting really needs to be integrated into the Finder,
not running independently as a separate app; I felt a little silly
using it. Incredibly, Frontier has no FFI! If AppleScript is released
any time soon and is any good it will quickly supplant Frontier; I
don't see how version 2 of Frontier can address its real problems.
In addition, Frontier does not support coercion of AppleEvent
descriptors (there is an undocumented ugly scary tedious manual
kludge) which makes using AppleEvent Objects very iffy.
 
QuicKeys is not a programming language; its application goes little
beyond capturing a series of user actions within a single program and
playing them back later. With some difficulty I was able to get Frontier
to open PhotoShop and for each of 350 photo documents in a folder
play a QuicKey that opened and systemmatically changed the brightness
and contrast of the photo. The QuicKeys program recognises just three
little custom AEvts and none take parameters! Note that you can't
send an AEvt to a QuicKey. And if you send a "play QuicKey" AEvt to the
QuicKeys program while it's playing a QuicKey, the QuicKey is aborted
and QuicKeys starts another (ouch!). Of course you can't find out
whether the other QuicKey finished without writing a 3GL program that
polls the QuicKeys program (really a driver) to see if it's idle.
 
The QuicKeys AppleEvents extension for sending AEvts from QuicKeys is
nicely done, but suffers all the limitations of QuicKeys.
 
> > [ Rich Parker: ]
> > If there was some way to use ftp capabilities from CompuServe
> > or AppleLink, I'd be a happy camper!
Nothing could ever make me happy with AppleLink.
 
Steve