Next step: software magnate
January 31, 2009
A few nights ago, I stayed up until 8am working on a program. A seven line program. Yes, that means I wrote seven lines of code and called it a program. And no, that does not mean they were super-long complicated lines of regular expressions or anything like that. In fact they were very simple lines of Applescript.
These seven lines actually took just a minute or two to write and test to satisfaction. After that, I took a while to marvel at my creation. Then came what actually took several hours: I went to work on documenting and sharing this program (you can now find it hosted on Google Code).
Some of you might remember a post of mine from June where I professed my love for OSX 10.5's QuickLook feature. In that post, I complained about not being able to get into QuickLook's Index Sheet mode quickly. The typical process (select everything in Finder, hit space, click the Full Screen button, click the Index Sheet button) is not so slow as to be unusable, but it is just slow enough to not be "quick." And quickness is what QuickLook is all about, naturally. So this simple program I wrote solves my problem, for the most part. It takes what is at best a 3-step keyboard & mouse task and turns it into a quick two-mouse-clicks task. Ideally, I'll find a way to make it a one-click task, but for now, two clicks will suffice. This pushes it back into the realm of "quick."
I'm not going to reprint the copy from the Google Code page here, so if you're intrigued, just head over to the quicklook-fullscreen-gallery Google Code page. There are (fairly) detailed instructions there, along with the actual download.
And if you have any suggestions, questions, or fixes, then by all means please let me know!
P.S. This is my first official - albeit meager - foray into releasing open-source software. And hopefully not my last. I'm proud of myself. (Can't you tell?)
Posts
February 3, 2009 at 3:53 PM
I am quite impressed. I have always looked at Apple Script with longing in my eye, but I have never actually delved into what it would take to actually use it. The best program I ever wrote, and come to think of it, the only one, I wrote with my buddy on DOS to trick my father into thinking that he was formatting his hard drive. It was just some yes and no text, but it was amazingly entertaining. Thats what you do in Arkansas when you are 12.
ps - Do you have any links to good places to read up on using applescript?
February 3, 2009 at 7:21 PM
I guess for someone just starting up, there's a few I've bookmarked:
- Apple's beginner tutorial
- Tiny Mac Tutorial's gui tutorial
- Doug's Applescripts for iTunes' beginner tutorials
- MacTech's UI basics
Let me know if you master the basics and want some more. I have lots of tutorials bookmarked.
July 7, 2009 at 9:54 AM
Hey Joe.... I found something that will turn your index view quicklook into a one button thing. You could write a quicklook protocol for viewing folders which displays the contents of the folder as an index view; it may even be possible to do this for the case of having multiple things seleted. I came across this because I just installed a quicklook protocol for ROOT: http://root.cern.ch/root/v524/Version524.news.html (very bottom of the page). No clue how they do it though.
July 7, 2009 at 11:21 AM
Not a bad idea, Dan. I've been meaning to learn how to write a quicklook protocol, so now I actually have a reason.