FastScripts 2.3
September 26th, 2006Today I released FastScripts 2.3 (and an updated FastScripts Lite!). FastScripts 2.3 contains the following significant changes:
- A refined grayscale menu bar icon
- Support for unmodified keys as script shortcuts (10.3 and later only)
- New preference for toggling “Launch at Login” feature
- Reorganized Preferences dialogs
- Improved AppleScript access to FastScripts script hierarchies
- Miscellaneous bug fixes
The new grayscale menu bar icon was basically saved by the help of Bryan Bell, an awesome icon designer who agreed to help me out with it. I’m not sure what’s more exciting, the fact that FastScripts has a great looking icon, or the fact that such a prestigious art is shipping in one of my applications! Thanks, Bryan.
Credit is also due to John Gruber who complained almost a year ago about the old icon, when I promised I’d look into improving it “within a few weeks.” He finally recommended Bryan to help me set things right.
September 29th, 2006 at 2:23 am
Hm, no way to not display the ‘Libaray Scripts’? Even Apple’s menu does that.
Also, have a close look at the icons for shell scripts. Somehow they look a lot better in Apple’s menu (perhaps an issue of scaling down the large icon vs using a small design size?).
September 29th, 2006 at 8:21 am
Thanks, ssp. I will look into improving the shell script icons’ appearance.
The ability to hide the “Library Scripts” is long overdue, and I’ll let you in on the dirty little secret: it’s not there yet because I have a more ambitious plan. I thought it would be better to give users the option of including or excluding whichever script paths they like. For instance, I sometimes need to use a directory full of testing scripts that are otherwise not applicable. For this reason, I implemented a feature (works today!) that can achieve what you want, but unfortunately it has no UI. This is of course, really silly, and I should add a simple “Hide Library Scripts” option if I’m going to take much longer finishing the more ambitious plan.
For the time being if this feature is important you can set a defaults value from the Terminal. More information in the very last item on the FastScripts FAQ page.