Hi there,
I am new to this forum, but not to Applescript. I’ve used it right from its start with practically every app I know and every stupid workaround I could come up with to do so. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to follow the development of the last few years that closely and had “post-process” all that ASOC stuff now over the last few days.
For me the essence (besides the uncertain future of AS in general) of what I read would be that I can finally do really rich and nice things with that script editor window and a web browser for documentation.
The only thing keeping me from being happy is the lack of support for blocks, which unfortunately are a big thing in Cocoa now.
I saw that one could work around this by writing categories on Cocoa classes which would “simply” remap the needed processing to a handler (delegate pattern or via using a selector). I saw that in the Myriad Helpers source code for sheets and I would like to employ that as a general pattern. Please correct me, if that’s not possible.
I always found it too complicated to write a complete AS extension just for a few calls I need, but writing a category for those few occasions seems exactly the right amount of work I would be willing to invest to be able to use everthing from a scripting window, even if it comes with all the ObjC extras, which, however, seems easier to handle on the ObjC side than on the AS side.
Now, that (much) said, I am still not sure about a good pattern to integrate this into my daily workflow. So I am looking for a good pattern to load and activate the categories so that they would be useable in a script app. I saw the inheritance approach and the load library command approach, but I am not sure (or safe) on how to implement this in the most minimalistic way (say for one ore two classes of an Apple framework). So a standard example template would be helpful.
Also, I wonder if there’s a possible standard pattern (e.g. the mentioned selector mapping), or set thereof, to convert a given block-based method into a selector based approach, so that we could just create a AS compatibility layer via batch processing a framework’s include files.
If that’s not possible in a general approach, I wonder if there are certain patterns for block use identifiable that then could be implemented (and collected here). Either as partially general patterns or for certain frameworks/class sets.
Sorry, if any of that was already posted and I oversaw it.
Ok, lots of text for a first post. But I wanted to add thanks to Shane and others who seemingly keep this all running and from whom I read so many great posts over the last few days.
-Stev