{"id":3912,"date":"2022-09-26T10:54:31","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T14:54:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/?p=3912"},"modified":"2022-10-04T13:04:36","modified_gmt":"2022-10-04T17:04:36","slug":"fastscripts-3-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/3912\/fastscripts-3-2","title":{"rendered":"FastScripts 3.2: Script Collections, Parameterized Scripts, Search Improvements"},"content":{"rendered":"

FastScripts 3.2 is now available on the FastScripts home page<\/a>, or by selecting \u201cCheck for Update\u201d from the FastScripts menu.<\/p>\n

This is a substantial update featuring support for custom script collections, parameterized scripts, improvements to the Scriptlight search feature, and more.<\/p>\n

Script Collections<\/h3>\n

By default, FastScripts searches for scripts in the same standard “Scripts” folders that Apple’s Script Menu searches. Notably: “\/Library\/Scripts” for system-wide scripts, and “[Home]\/Library\/Scripts” for your personal collection of scripts. Anything in these standard folders shows up in the FastScripts menu, can be searched with the Scriptlight search feature, and can be configured with keyboard shortcuts via FastScripts’s Preferences.<\/p>\n

But not everybody keeps their script collections in these standard locations, and for that matter, not everybody keeps only one or two collections of scripts. That’s why I’ve expanded FastScripts to support an arbitrary number of user-determined locations, whose script contents will all be available to the app. To customize these collections, you can add your own folders, remove the default ones, or both:<\/p>\n

\"UntitledImage\"<\/p>\n

Parameterized Scripts<\/h3>\n

For advanced workflows, FastScripts supports the ability to invoke any script … from within another script. I know, pretty meta, right? This can be useful for nesting behaviors from multiple scripts, or for conditionalizing whether particular scripts are run or not.<\/p>\n

The ability to run scripts has gotten a lot more powerful in FastScripts 3.2, with the addition of robust support for specifying parameters to invoked scripts. As a trivial example, you might have a script called “Say Hello” that expects parameters for first and last names:<\/p>\n

on<\/b> <\/span>sayHi<\/span>(<\/span>firstName<\/span>, <\/span>lastName<\/span>)<\/span><\/p>
\ttell<\/b> <\/span>application<\/i><\/span> \"FastScripts\"<\/span><\/p>
\t\tset<\/b> <\/span>greeting<\/span> to<\/b> \"Hi \" & <\/span>firstName<\/span> & \" \" & <\/span>lastName<\/span><\/p>
\t\tdisplay message<\/b><\/span> greeting<\/span><\/p>
\tend<\/b> tell<\/b><\/span><\/p>
end<\/b> <\/span>sayHi<\/span><\/p>
\u00a0<\/p>
on<\/b> <\/span>run<\/b><\/span> {<\/span>firstName<\/span>, <\/span>lastName<\/span>}<\/span><\/p>
\tsayHi<\/span>(<\/span>firstName<\/span>, <\/span>lastName<\/span>)<\/span><\/p>
end<\/b> <\/span>run<\/b><\/span><\/p><\/pre>\n
Now you can run a script like this, either from within FastScripts, or invoked by another AppleScript utility:<\/p>\n
tell<\/b> <\/span>application<\/i><\/span> \"FastScripts\"<\/span><\/p>
\tset<\/b> <\/span>myScript<\/span> to<\/b> <\/span>script item<\/i><\/span> \"Say Hi\"<\/span><\/p>
\tset<\/b> <\/span>myTask<\/span> to<\/b> <\/span>run<\/b><\/span> myScript<\/span> with parameters<\/span> {\"Daniel\", \"Jalkut\"}<\/span><\/p>
end tell<\/b><\/span><\/p><\/pre>\n
And running it will yield the expected result:<\/p>\n
\"Screenshot<\/p>\n
Script Results<\/h3>\n
If you look carefully at the examples above, you’ll see that unlike Apple’s built-in “run script” command, FastScripts doesn’t immediately return the result of running a script. This is because you are free to kick off multiple scripts and, thanks to FastScripts’s multi-process design, they will each run in parallel.<\/p>\n
Instead of a result, the “run” command in FastScripts returns a script task<\/em> object. You can use this reference to “force stop” a running script, but perhaps more importantly, you can now use it to await the script’s result. When your script requests the “result” of a script item, FastScripts will suspend the execution of your script until the result is available. So if you wanted to kick off 5 scripts and wait for all of them to return results, you could “run” them, and then ask for the result of each of them.<\/p>\n
Here’s a simple example, wherein a script called “Add Numbers” is designed to take two parameters:<\/p>\n
\n
tell<\/b> <\/span>application<\/i><\/span> \"FastScripts\"<\/span><\/p>
\tset<\/b> <\/span>myScript<\/span> to<\/b> <\/span>script item<\/i><\/span> \"Add N<\/span>u<\/span>mbers\"<\/span><\/p>
\tset<\/b> <\/span>myTask<\/span> to<\/b> <\/span>run<\/b><\/span> myScript<\/span> with parameters<\/span> {19, 7}<\/span><\/p>
\tset<\/b> <\/span>answer<\/span> to<\/b> <\/span>result<\/span> of<\/b> <\/span>myTask<\/span><\/p>
\tdisplay message<\/b><\/span> \"The answer is \" & <\/span>answer<\/span><\/p>
end tell<\/b><\/span><\/p><\/pre>\n
For practical purposes, you can think of asking for the “result” of a script task as repeatedly checking to see if the script has completed, and “delaying” the script until it’s done. In reality, the behavior is far more efficient than this!<\/p>\n
Search Improvements<\/h3>\n
Scriptlight, the built-in search feature that allows you to quickly locate scripts matching a particular name or substring, can sometimes identify two scripts that have the exact same name, but are located at different locations in your script collections. Until now, this had the unwanted effect of turning the process of searching for and running one of these scripts a kind of gamble. Would it be the one you wanted, or not?<\/p>\n
In FastScripts 3.2 special care is taken to differentiate search results so that identically named items are further identified by the folder that contains them. There is still some risk of ambiguity if you have identically named scripts inside identically named folders, but this should solve the problem for most scenarios:<\/p>\n
\"Screenshot<\/p>\n
FastScripts 3.2 Summary<\/h3>\n
In sum, this update packs a powerful punch, including a number of new features to supercharge workflows, as well as a number of minor updates and bug fixes. Here’s the complete list of changes for this update:<\/p>\n