AddressBook UK Mapping

Streetmapping for ABook.

Very cool - opens StreetMap.co.uk Maps of contact addresses in Pather’s Address Book.app

Veta Universal for UIQ

One piece of software that I have wanted for a long time has just been released.

Veta for UIQ. Veta has been available for Series 60 and Palm for a while, but wasn’t available for the Sony Ericsson P800.

Veta is one half of a partnership - It’s other half is Romeo. Together they allow you to control your Mac (via AppleScript) from your Bluetooth-Enabled Palm , Symbian Mobile Phone or Sony Ericsson phone.

This is the kind of application the creators of Bluetooth were thinking of when they were developing the standard - It really does mean you have a Personal Area Network - where devices around you can communicate and interact with each other.

The Rise and Fall of the Script Menu

Classic

In the Mac OS there is a very useful feature called the Script Menu. It allows the user to execute AppleScripts from the Menu Bar. It appeared first in the Classic OS and was available to the right of the application’s own menus (to the left of the universally-available “Help” menu): It was available on a per-application basis - if the foremost application did not support the menu then it would not appear. In order to populate the menu you would place AppleScripts in an application-specific folder. e.g. for iTunes a folder called “Scripts” of the iTunes folder (Which was generally in the Applications folder.) The user could also place scripts in their Documents > iTunes folder for scripts that were available for that user only.

Mac OS X 10.2 - Jaguar

When OS X (10.2 Jaguar) was released the Script Menu returned to the Mac OS in a much more elegant incarnation.

It was implemented as a Menu Extra - in the top right of the Menu Bar - like the Volume and Battery menu extras. I personally prefer this - it seemed out of place amongst text-based menus. It is not limited to AppleScripts - it can also run Shell Scripts. Instead of each application managing it’s own script collections in odd folders scattered all over the filesystem there was now a central repository for Menu Scripts - The “Scripts” folder of the Library. Because it uses the Library it respects the “cascading” metaphor that Mac OS X inherited from NeXT - The idea that Library resources are a composite of resources from the Network , Host & User libraries. This means you can have scripts available to all users on your OS X Server network, available to all users on a specific machine (host) or just available to one user - The scale of availability depends on which Library the resource is placed in. It uses the “Application Support” metaphor to allow scripts to be application-specific - if you are running an application called FOO the Script Menu will also show Scripts that are at the path Library/Scripts/Applications/FOO/ (remember that Library is any of the three available Libraries.)

Mac OS X 10.3 - Panther - A retrograde step?

In Panther, certain apps (DVD Player, Address Book) seem to have had amnesia - they think we’re back in OS 9. They have implemented their own, classic-style AppleScript Menu. Not only is it ugly it also interferes with the real Script Menu!

As you can see from the ScreenShot on the right these apps display an unnecssary Extra Script Menu (in an ugly place if you ask me) - but also they expect their scripts to be kept in a directory called “Foo scripts” of the “scripts” directory (replace Foo with the name of the app.)

What’s wrong with that? Well, for a start any Directories that are put in the root of the Scripts Directory are automatically listed in the real script menu - and so you end up with a horribly screwed-up Script Menu! So you quietly curse and remove the offending “Address Book Scripts” folder - and the next time you launch AddressBook it REPLACES THE DAMN DIRECTORY!

Panther

Mac OS X (10.3) Panther has been released.

Services in the Contextual Menu

In Mac OS X the Services menu is hidden away up in the Application Menu - miles from the data it is working on. Since the Services are context-sensitive it seems natural that it should be available from the Contextual Menu (the one that appears when you right-click (or control-click)).

I always wondered why Apple hasn’t done this - I used to have a pet theory that someone high-up at Apple disliked it. Now I know the real reason:

This page explains it:

Eric Schlegel of Apple says:
“We’re aware of this issue and I agree it would be a useful thing to do. The tricky part is that the Carbon implementation of Services requires that a Carbon event be sent to an event target representing the object to which the service would be apply. When a contextual menu is opened, there is no event target passed to the Contextual Menu Manager to indicate the object to which the menu applies; therefore, the Services support in Carbon has no where to send its Carbon events.
I’ve got some ideas for new Contextual Menu Manager APIs that would take an event target so we could solve this in the future, but it will probably require application adoption.”

TaggingService

I have just posted my Tagging Service.

I have been trying to do something like this for a while now - but was trying to make it too GUI based - which allows more options, but was a nightmare because of the way that Services get invoked.

The way it works now is more Service-like - the tag that gets applied to the text is dependant on the format of the text to be tagged:

for example:
foo:bar becomes <foo>bar</foo>

iTunes

Tom’s Blog notes wisely that iTunes is now available for Windows - If you use Windows (not 98 or ME) give it a go - You’ll like it (and it’s free.)

[edit] - well it looks like it’s quite popular

JavaC Script

I don’t code for Java, but someone wanted a script that would compile Java from within SubEthaEdit and it sounded interesting, so I wrote one.

One of the clever things about SubEthaEdit is that it allows multiple people to edit the same document at the same time.

So if you’re the kind of person that hacks away at Java sources in a flock I suggest you download it

Why Oh Why Does iSync Hate Me So…

More

Here we go again

Well - I have installed Movable Type again - Almost one year after my initial install. Hopefully this time my post count will rise above one per year.