Hi,
i have two questions:
a) System Events isn’t always working and strange errors can collide with it commands. I search a way to get a list of
visible processes as they are sorted in the heads-up hud (command+shift) panel. Some suggestions ?
b) i search also a nicer image manipulation command line tool as sips. When i scale images using sips, they reveal much more grainy, jagged lines as when i scale the same image using bicubic interpolation in Gimp, for example.
Maybe ImageMagic ? but how to implement it in Applescript ?
This is not a command line tool, but you can try it. This script scales my images down to 100 pixels but you can change it to scale up and see how it looks:
set f to choose file
set pp to POSIX path of f
set desk_file to (POSIX path of (path to desktop)) & "NewImage"
tell application "Image Events"
set the_image to (open f)
scale the_image to size 100
save the_image in desk_file
end tell
Uhm.i see no difference from using Image events and sips. In fact, Image Events should be the Mac-Os translation of the bin tool itself.
I’ll look into image Magick.
Good, lets see about question 2: top should provide all the necessary tools i need. However, i get errors when writing this:
tell application "System Events" to set nm to name of current user
do shell script "top -U " & nm & " "
Some commands like this work only in the Terminal. But there, i get background processes too.
I need to get: (using Applescript)
visible, windowed processes
how long they run, each one
if and how long they are sleeping (running but not working)
You really want to read up on asl, Dtrace, and syslog in that order. I think Dtrace is the most convenient tool, but I am not sure how it will work on the whole system, maybe asl gives a helping hand here. syslog, can do many things as well, that you may be interested in.
You should know, that if you are constantly tracing your whole system, it will affect your system performance.
There are some good reference documents on Dtrace, but I’d start with what is written in Instruments Guide by Apple. And then I’d head straight into the article atMacTech.com. (Search for Dtrace).
Edit
You may also be interested in reading: Technical Note TN2124/ Mac OS X Debugging Magic
If you don’t have much luck with ImageMagick let me know. Though you will need to be running Mavericks if you want to use my new program. But I will be soon looking for early adopters.
I’m working on a tool that sounds like it will do what you need. The functionality I’ve got to now might be all that you need but the documentation is far from complete. (I’ve spent longer writing documentation that writing the LaunchAgent). I’ve not yet written an installer but if you’d like to get early access let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
The command line tool side of the project will always be a free download so you don’t need to be worried about me charging for the command line tools once I’ve released publicly the software.
The bits of the tool that I haven’t started working on yet are the bits that will make this project unique.
The documentation as it is currently. Please ignore installation instructions currently.
McUsrII, thank you very much. Thats much more as i expected! now i have a starting point to focus and monitor process performances.
Kevin, that sounds great!
Oh.Imagine Photo.old times. Would be great to have something back in command line format, this time. Imagine Photo used a strange scripting syntax which wasn’t really intuitive. This app became relative quickly obsolete-if you’re able to insert some features of this nice exemplar app .i have some nice ideas for features as well, if you permit.
About Maverick. don’t know exactly, when i’ll make the upgrade. Some apps and Win-Wrappers i use run still in 32-bit mode.
take care.
So far Maverick has worked all right with my 32-bit apps. You should try to install it from a usb-stick, and boot from the usb, (plenty of how-tos out there), so you can try it out, it is really great when you come from Snow Leopard.
