Dialogs are essential when you want to communicate with users so that they can make decisions on a course of action when notified of the state of an application or the system itself. Well written dialogs that are informative and clear are vital to any credible software solution.
Furthermore, as you’ll see, I will try to show you how to make your dialogs not only easy for your users to understand, but also easy to use so that they will always know what course of action to take.
With all that said, here is a very simple dialog script to notify the user of the result of some action:
display dialog "Your text here" with icon stop buttons {"OK"} default button {"OK"}
–Note in the above script that you could substitute‘note’or‘caution’for ’stop’ to indicate varying degrees of importance or urgency.
This yields:
–Taking the above script a step further, you could include ‘giving up after 5′ (or 15, 20, 60 etc) so that a dialog will automatically close itself after the indicated interval of time:
display dialog "Your text here" with icon stop buttons {"OK"} default button {"OK"} giving up after 5
–You can also have multiple button choices (up to 3). Take special note of the formatting required for multiple buttons:
display dialog "Your text here" with icon note buttons {"OK","Cancel"} default button {"Cancel"} giving up after 30
–Note in the above example, if you click on ‘Cancel’ or strike the enter or return keys, it will generate an error message. to avoid this and to get your dialog to close ’silently’, the above must be enclosed within a ‘try clause’ such as:
try
display dialog "Your text here" with icon caution buttons {"OK","Cancel"} default button {"Cancel"} giving up after 30 on error
end try
I hope that those of you who are new to appleScripting will find these sample dialog scripts useful as you begin to explore the magic of AppleScript. If you still don’t understand how these scripts work, I strongly urge you to cut and paste them into your Script Editor and run them – this should clear up any questions you may still have.
If you have any questions or comments, contact me at: hyperscripter@gmail.com or http://twitter.com/hyperscripter or to subscribe, click the By Email link at the top of the page
In my next post, I will continue in more detail with these and other dialogs and how they can be used to process text and variables etc, so that your scripts can take a course of action.
If you are more of a techy kind of person and are comfortable with using Terminal, here is a script you can use to easily create multiple folders:
First, for a single folder, type in: mkdir "Folder 1"
--or whatever you want to name your folder, this creates a new directory, which, in effect is a new folder.
To place multiple items in the 'Documents' folder:cd/Users/Administrator/Documents
mkdir "Folder 1" "Folder 2" "Folder 3"To quickly create multiple folders, create a text file with the desired folder names (as many as you want) and name it something like 'folderList.txt'. Next type this in Terminal:cat folderList.txt |xargs mkdirOr you could create folders with the same prefix by entering:mkdir "Invoices " {"Corporate", "Individual", "Pro-Bono"}
Digg This!!
An AppleScript to Verify a Date
Run this in the Script Editor:
set dateRecord to (current date)
set defaultDate to (date string of dateRecord)
try
set apptDate to text returned of (display dialog "Enter appointment date:" default answer defaultDate buttons {"Set"} default button {"Set"})
set datetext to apptDate as text
date apptDate --if an invalid date is entered, the next dialog is aborted and it triggers the error alert below.
display dialog datetext & " is a valid date." with icon note buttons {"OK"} default button {"OK"}
on error
set alertText to "An error has occurred!"
set messageText to quote & datetext & quote & " is an invalid date."
display alert alertText message messageText as warning buttons {"OK"} default button "OK" giving up after 15
return
end try
Concept Drawing for iMac prior to Production
Fun HTML
Use this to add interest to your pages, but be careful, if you overdo it, it can make your page look gaudy, if not ridiculous!
Here's is the code as it appears above:
<p align="center" style="padding: 5px; background-color: #FFCE9C; border: dotted 5px #FFCE9C;"><marquee width=20% behavior=scroll direction=left loop=infinite> Latest Headlines... </marquee><blink>Read All About It</blink>/p>
Copy and paste this into the Script Editor and try it out:
set defaultVolume to "3"
set volumeLevel to text returned of ¬
(display dialog ¬
"Set the system volume to (7 is the highest):"¬
default answer defaultVolume with icon note¬
buttons {"OK"} default button "OK") as integer
set volumeValues to {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7} ¬
as list
if volumeLevel is not in volumeValues then ¬
set volumeLevel to defaultVolume
tell application "Finder"
try
set volume volumeLevel
beep 2
on error errDlog
display dialog errDlog with icon stop ¬
buttons {"Abort"} default button ¬
"Abort" giving up after 15
end try
end tell
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Heres an AppleScript for backing up a selected group of HyperCard files. this was used in one of my HyperCard stacks, but could be adapted for use in OSX programs with little or no modification:
send "suiteBkp(true)" to bg btn "BackupSuite"
--Use this line to call the handler below (true displays a notification dialog when the process is complete, you must have a button named bg btn "BackupSuite"):
on suiteBkp(theBoolean)
copy line 1 of field "selectedFolder" to theHFFolderPath --You'll need a hidden field named "selectedFolder" that a script (prior to the call) will place the path to the desired folder in.
tell application "Finder"
activate
set todaysDate to (current date)
set bkpYear to (year of todaysDate)
set monthlyBkp to ("Monthly Reports_" & bkpYear) as string
if exists (folder "HyperCard Backup") then
select folder "HyperCard Backup"
delete selection
end if
if exists (folder "HyperCard Backup" of folder theHFFolderPath) then
select folder "HyperCard Backup" of folder theHFFolderPath
delete selection
end if
make new folder at folder theHFFolderPath with properties {name:"HyperCard Backup"}
select {file "Appointments" of folder theHFFolderPath, ¬ file "HyperFile" of folder theHFFolderPath, ¬ file "Outstanding Invoices" of folder theHFFolderPath, ¬ file "Year" of folder theHFFolderPath, ¬ file monthlyBkp of folder theHFFolderPath, ¬
copy selection to folder "HyperCard Backup" of folder theHFFolderPath
select folder "HyperCard Backup" of folder theHFFolderPath
select file "Appointments" of folder ¬ "HyperFile Suite Backup" of folder theHFFolderPath
set name of selection to "Appointments.bkp"
select file "HyperFile" of folder "HyperCard Backup" of ¬ folder theHFFolderPath
set name of selection to "HyperFile.bkp"
select file "Outstanding Invoices" of ¬ folder "HyperFile Suite Backup" of folder theHFFolderPath
set name of selection to "Outstanding Invoices.bkp"
select file "Year" of folder "HyperFile Suite Backup" of ¬ folder theHFFolderPath
set name of selection to "Year.bkp"
set prefMonthlyBkp to (monthlyBkp & ".bkp") as string
select file monthlyBkp of folder "HyperFile Suite Backup" of ¬ folder theHFFolderPath
set name of selection to prefMonthlyBkp
select folder "HyperFile Suite Backup" of folder "The HyperFile Folder"
move selection to desktop
end tell
if theBoolean = "true" then
tell application "HyperCard"
activate
display dialog ¬ "Your backup has been saved to desktop." buttons {"Done"} default button {"Done"} with icon 129 giving up after 10
end tell
end if
end suiteBkp
Here's a simple, but very useful little HyperTalk script for verifying the validity of a date entered by a user, assuming that you have a menu item "flag date..." (or whatever you choose to name it) or it could be altered slightly and placed within a mouseUp statement:
if menuItem = "Flag Date..." then
global tryDate
ask "Enter a date for your new appointment:" with the long date
if it ≠ "" and the result ≠ "Cancel" then
put it into tryDate
else
put "" into tryDate
exit doMenu
end if
if invalidDate() then
answer "The date entered is not valid!"
put "" into tryDate
exit doMenu
end if
--Here you would put the statements to execute if the entered date proves to be valid
put "" into tryDate
end if
function invalidDate
global tryDate
convert tryDate to short date
if the result = "invalid date" then
return true
else
return false
end if
end invalidDate
Mac SE (circa 1987), was a more advanced version of the Mac Plus and had an internal hard drive.
YouTube Video Search Script:
tell application "Finder"
try
set webSearch to text returned of (display dialog "Enter YouTube Video
Search" default answer "" buttons {"Search", "Cancel"} default button 1)
open location "http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=" & webSearch
on error theError
display dialog theError
end try
end tell
Dialogs are essential when you want to communicate with users so that they can make decisions on a course of action when notified of the state of an application or the system itself. Well written dialogs that are informative and clear are vital to any credible software solution.
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