{"id":3685,"date":"2021-02-11T08:28:16","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T13:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/?p=3685"},"modified":"2021-02-11T09:32:39","modified_gmt":"2021-02-11T14:32:39","slug":"fastscripts-3-beta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/3685\/fastscripts-3-beta","title":{"rendered":"FastScripts 3 Beta"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/fastscripts\/\">FastScripts<\/a> is one of Red Sweater&#8217;s most beloved, albeit niche, apps. The Mac-based scripting utility adds a menu bar icon for running scripts, and supports attaching keyboard shortcuts to them. Like many customers, I&#8217;ve been running it on my Mac <em>literally every day<\/em> for &#8230; seemingly forever.<\/p>\n<p>Although the app has been continuously developed over the past twenty years or so, and has received many updates, it&#8217;s been a long time since I released a <em>major upgrade<\/em>. I went looking through the Red Sweater Blog archives to try to discover when FastScripts 2.0 shipped, and I couldn&#8217;t find a post. Why? It shipped before 2005, the year when this blog debuted. I had to resort to searching my email archives, where I discovered that FastScripts 2.0 was released on June 10, 2004. That release inroduced keyboard shortcuts and a number of new preferences to the app.<\/p>\n<p>Over the years I&#8217;ve had a lot of ideas about how FastScripts might evolve, and have worked on new features intermittently. As part of <a href=\"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/3682\/fresh-start\">my recent decision<\/a> to reinvest in Red Sweater, I decided to focus on finally shipping some of those features in a major 3.0 upgrade. Today, I&#8217;d like to share what I&#8217;ve got so far, as a public beta:<\/p>\n<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/redsweater.com\/fastscripts\/FastScriptsBeta.zip\">Download FastScripts 3.0 Beta<\/a><br \/>\n(Free of charge until public release &#8211; Requires macOS 10.14.6 or later)\n<\/p>\n<p>The major changes in this upgrade are the introduction of a search feature so you can easily sift through all the scripts in the menu, and a major overhaul to the way scripts are executed so that multiple scripts can be fired off in rapid succession without interfering with one another. The upgrade also includes a number of other changes. Here&#8217;s the complete list:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Scriptlight: quickly search your scripts from the FastScripts menu\n<ul>\n<li>Currently matches based on script title, may expand to match content<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Scripts are always run in a separate process\n<ul>\n<li>Low latency execution by priming script running process<\/li>\n<li>No limit to running simultaneous scripts<\/li>\n<li>Scripts can&#8217;t &#8220;hang up&#8221; the main app or cause it to crash<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>FastScripts scripting changes\n<ul>\n<li>New &#8220;open web page&#8221; command streamlines visiting favorite URLs in whatever browser is active<\/li>\n<li>FastScripts&#8217;s own hierarchies of scripts are now described as &#8220;script collections&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Improved the layout of text in the &#8220;display message&#8221; message panels<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Other improvements\n<ul>\n<li>Conflicts are now detected when setting keyboard shortcuts for scripts<\/li>\n<li>Keyboard shortcuts are now disabled while editing a script&#8217;s keyboard shortcut<\/li>\n<li>Symbolic links are now supported in script folder hierarchies<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Apart from the changes listed above, I hope to soon offer the ability to monitor and cancel long-running scripts are launched from FastScripts.<\/p>\n<p>This upgrade will address a lot of of minor usability limitations of FastScripts 2 while also setting the groundwork for continued evolution of the app going forward. If you run scripts on your Mac, I hope you&#8217;ll consider giving it a try!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>FastScripts is one of Red Sweater&#8217;s most beloved, albeit niche, apps. The Mac-based scripting utility adds a menu bar icon for running scripts, and supports attaching keyboard shortcuts to them. Like many customers, I&#8217;ve been running it on my Mac literally every day for &#8230; seemingly forever. Although the app has been continuously developed over [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fastscripts","category-red-sweater-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3685"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3693,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3685\/revisions\/3693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}