Category: Scripting

Tim Bumgarner: New Cocoa methods for loading data into a table view in AppleScript Studio. I was just starting to work on a new feature in Manila Envelope that required a table view and I was shuddering at the prospect of having to load it in a repeat loop in AppleScript (in my experience, loops in interpreted languages lead to severe performance problems). Tim’s method allows you to pass a list directly into the method, avoiding looping and making your code much cleaner and faster.

In my experience, further movements in this direction would be wise. Let us programmatically specify a relationship between a data source and a flat file. Or a data source and a relational database. Or a data source and a SOAP call. Features like this were what made programming PowerBuilder such a joy—you could specify the relationship between an arbitrary data source and a class to manipulate that data source easily, and the commands to manipulate the data through the class were consistent no matter what the original data source was.
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Cocoa Dev Central: Internet Version Checking. Cool little technique for using an XML file on a web server to provide built in version checking capabilities. Of course the flat file could be replaced with a proper web service that would allow you to do this checking from an AppleScript instead of a full blown Cocoa app. I may play with doing this from Manila Envelope.
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The latest from Userland… full New York Times headlines in Radio UserLand. Having previously subscribed to Times feeds from NewsIsFree, I can only guess at the technical differences. Dave has been talking for days now about new drivers to allow Radio’s news page to pick up non-RSS XML-based news sources. My guess is Dave made an agreement with the Times to allow Userland to syndicate an existing XML format there and gave Radio the ability to read it. I think (but am not sure) that this is different from the way NewsIsFree works.

From a qualitative perspective? NewsIsFree’s feeds don’t include bylines; their opinion feed doesn’t include letters to the editor. Their feeds appear to be more selective and differently formatted.

Is Dave competing with NewsIsFree? Not in the professional market; their response to my story about syndication makes that pretty clear. But what is he doing? Userland’s not about content, it’s about providing pipes for content. The New York Times feeds appear to be the demo for this new Radio capability.

The new version of OmniOutliner2OPML, v. 1.0.2, has been released. It now produces something that looks like conformant XML–attributes of an <outline> element are now within the base tag, and outline elements without children are closed inline with an “/&gt”. If you have an OPML compatible application, I’d appreciate hearing if you can parse output from my script.
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Stan Krute pointed me to his Java outliner that supports OPML, the Java Outline Editor (JOE). Looking at the OPML it produces, I realized I had the format wrong. A fix will come later today.

The Radio Community Server, which hosts communities of Radio UserLand users behind the firewall, is now available at no charge. What does this mean? Radio is great knowledge management software–you blog about stuff going on (in your life or your industry or your project) and it automatically flows out to other people who have subscribed to your newsfeed. They get it downloaded to their desktops when they’re not looking.

Free? I wasn’t expecting this business move, Dave, but it’s smart. It’s easier for people to understand the benefits of Radio than of the RCS, but once they start playing with the RCS and realize the implications they’ll expand use of Radio inside their organization. Razor and blades, razor and blades… 🙂
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Version 1.0.1 of my OmniOutliner2OPML script is now available for download. I couldn’t get through to my iDisk, so I posted it here instead. This version fixes a stupid bug that was introduced at the last minute.

The 1.0.1 release does not address some more fundamental issues with the script:

• At present, there seems to be no way to get the type of a column in an OmniOutliner file via AppleScript–at least it’s not published in OO’s dictionary.
• I can’t find documentation for the “type” element in the outline element of OPML. I know that “link,” “file,” and RSS are valid types, but what do those mean in the context of data in an OmniOutliner file? And what are the other valid types?

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Thanks to those who downloaded the script yesterday. Bruce D’Arcus pointed out that I made a stupid error before I published it yesterday that made it, um, inoperable. I will find a way to post the fix shortly–I seem to be having trouble getting to my iDisk over our dial-up line.

I got tired of complaining about OmniOutliner not having OPML capability, so I hacked a quick AppleScript to make it happen. It’s very beta right now, but it works for outlines that aren’t too deep. Currently it’s choking on my outline for the sitePref documentation, so I’m trying to go back and figure out why. You can download OmniOutliner2OPML from my scripts page.
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A new version of AppleScript Studio appears to be available for developers at the Apple Developer Connection (register free). Still in beta, but it appears to address some really significant issues, including native support for the User Defaults framework in Cocoa and some other stuff…

Saw this via mac.scripting.com: Will Wade has released a new AppleScript based on my iTunes2Blog
that posts the currently playing iTunes track to Blogger. I’m flattered and happy that my early script was helpful to someone. Interestingly, I don’t seem to be able to find Will’s blog anywhere, or I’d point to it…

Another issue with sitePrefs.get: the format in which the results for news item departments are created can return malformed XML if the department name contains a space.

Unfortunately, this will cause a delay in the next release of Manila Envelope until I either figure out how to work around it or work with UserLand to get it fixed.

So I’m having problems setting site prefs from my application. I was going to add a quick feature to allow managing editors to change the tagline of their site from within Manila Envelope, but I can’t get sitePref.set to work–it either complains about something not being a valid address or responds “true” without doing anything. I’ve put a detailed description on the XMLRPC discussion site.

Frontier News: New Manila feature: permanent links for News Items. I always wondered how I could get people linking to a particular item on my page. Now it’s under the # symbol after each item. Thanks, guys.

Check this out: Oliver’s crossPost Plug-In. “This simple Plug-In installs XML-RPC handlers to post news items to a Manila site and retrieve a department list of that site.” My question: how does this compare to calling newsItem.create in the standard Manila API?
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