What's New in OSA Menu 1.1

Recording

The OSAMenu now includes a Start/Stop Recording menu item which allows you to quickly record a new script without having to bring up your script editor. Just select the menu item to start the recorder, and when you choose it again to stop recording, you'll be asked where to save the newly created script.

Hierarchical Menus

OSAMenu will now display up to two levels of hierarchy when folders are placed in your Universal Scripts folder or any application scripts folder. This will allow you to better organize your scripts and not clutter up the top level of your menu.

FinderMenu/MenuSharing

For users of Userland Frontier, OSAMenu now includes all of the functionality of the old FinderMenu extension (but FASTER!), and more! Not only will the Finder now be a menusharing savvy application, but by editing a resource in the OSA Menu extension ('OSMs') you can make ANY application menusharing savvy - with FileMaker Pro and NisusWriter being covered by default!

And if that weren't enough, you can give any shared menu an icon for a title instead of text. Just set the menu title to IFAM(###) where ### is the ID of an icon family stored in either OSA Menu, the OSA Menu Icons file or the OSA Menu Prefs file. Feel free to add your own to the OSA Menu Icons file in addition to what's already there. For a list of the icons, see the OSA Menu 1.1 Documentation.

Support for Droplets

If you place a Droplet in your Scripts folder and enable the "Run Droplet with Finder selection" preference, then when that droplet is run, it's "on open" routine will be called and passed the list of currently selected items in the Finder. This allows you to write some very useful scripts!

Support for Simple Menus

For those deploying OSA Menu in a large setting with less sophisticated users, you can now setup OSA Menu to no longer show the extra features of recording, opening the script editor and changing the preferences. This feature now takes effect immediately and doing so will make the "Preferences" menu item inaccessable. In order to get back to full menus, you either need to delete your "OSA Menu Preferences" file and then restart OR hold down the option key when choosing "About OSA Menu".

Support for Frontier 5

Users of Frontier 5.0 can now place ANY type of exported object (script, table, WP text, etc.) in OSA Menu's folders and choosing it from the menu will cause it to run/open in Frontier 5. This gives Frontier 5 users the ability to have access at any time to their favorite items - which means Frontier users now can have a "global" set of scripts! And if you hold down the option key when choosing the menu item, it will open the object up for editing (mostly needed for scripts).

Support the Appearance Manager

Users of MacOS8, or those running the Appearance Manager extension under System 7.x can now assign key equivalents to menu items that include the shift, control and option keys. For details, see the OSA Menu 1.1 Documentation.

New Preferences

Now that OSA Menu offers features for both AppleScript and Userland Frontier users, and some users only use one of these tools, but not both, you can now turn the individual options on/off via the Preferences dialog.

Other fixes & changes

• For users of PreFab's Player utility, instead of running all your scripts in special "Player Mode", only those scripts whose name starts with a <> (option-shift-v) will run in that mode.



• apps launched by OSAMenu are now always launched in foreground



• when launching an app, OSAMenu now draws the name in the menubar - just like the Finder!



• fixed a STUPID bug which was keeping exemption lists from not working :(



• OSAMenu now creates & uses a separate prefs file



• Finally fixed the dreaded -600 error when using PreFab Player



• fixed a bug where application scripts with key equivs wouldn't work :(



• Added Scripter (from MainEvent) to the list of supported script editors



• The "path to me" command in AppleScript is supported by OSA Menu so that if you use this in your script, you will get back the full path to where the running script is located.



• OSA Menu now correctly runs scripts in OS8 Finder, having to work around it's interested functionality!

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What's New in OSA Menu 1.0.2

Preferences

Run Scripts

You can now choose from a selection of ways in which OSA Menu will run the scripts you select. The MAIN REASON that this feature is neccessary is due to some applications that make STUPID assumptions about when Apple events will arrive. If you don't have any problems when running scripts with OSA Menu, you shouldn't need to change this preference. If you do, or are just curious, here is some information about the different modes.

* Fast is the default mode for OSA Menu and is the way that OSA Menu 1.0 & 1.0.1 always worked. It works by executing the script immediately and also causing it to run faster in the current application using a technique called "send-to-self".

* Compatible is a slight variant of Fast which works much like Fast does EXCEPT that instead of executing the script immediately, it asks the Apple event Manager to wait till the next event loop and THEN execute the script.

* Very Compatible is quite different from all other methods in that instead of OSA Menu running the script, it instead uses another application (the default is OSA Runner) to run the script. Although this is the most compatible way to run scripts, it is also the slowest since it has to find & then launch OSA Runner. (see below for more details on OSA Runner, and how to use other programs to do the same job)

Special Note for users of Prefab Player^TM and MacOS8!

In order to allow the doMenu() command available in Player to operate or to script the OS8 Finder, OSA Menu must take some interesting liberties with your scripts. OSA Menu will automatically detect the presence of Player (or use of Finder 8.x) and if your script name starts with a <> (option-shift-v) will execute scripts in a special mode which will usually have no visible ramifications UNLESS your scripts bring up any dialogs or alerts (like via ScriptError or DisplayDialog). If you do this in your script, it is recommended that you put an "activate" command before the command that will display the alert. This will make sure that the alert comes up in the front application rather than in the back.

Edit Scripts With

Now that there are a number of other script editors available to replace Apple's, OSA Menu now gives you a choice of which one to use when editing a script, either directly via option-selecting a menu item or when an error occurs.

OSA Runner

OSA Runner is a new part of the OSA Menu package, which is used automatically by OSA Menu when you choose to run scripts "Very Compatible". In addition to being used in this fashion, it is also a nice little utility for running scripts from the desktop via drag & drop. You can drop as many scripts as you like on OSA Runner and it will run them each in sequence (sorry, no threading here). Of course, OSA Runner is scriptable, so you can use it from your own scripts or with applications that can open documents with other applications to run scripts from them.