Actions Interface Experiment
Description
I have been thinking about alternative Acton interfaces. I’ve dabbled with alternative interfaces for actions in the past. These require building an AppleScript application in XCode which handles the interface, and using polling (AppleScript) code in the Action itself to track a field and detect a chance. The change indicates whether the OK button has been clicked, and data can be retrieved. This is a fairly neat way of achieving the result, but there are drawbacks. The big drawback is that the interface is an application, and the user has to run it before the Action can. This is because of security issues and is to do with AppleScripts calling AppleScripts.
So I decided to look at Widgets. Widgets are run in Dashboard, which is not what we want, but DashCode ALSO creates web applications for the iPhone. These are plain old HTML/JavaScript/CSS affairs. You can open them in Safari, and with some jiggery-pokery, you can open them from an Action using AppleScript and populate data form fields with data from the Action itself. As the Web Application is just javaScript, once you have the data exchange running, the interface behaviours, look and feel etc. can be built in DashCode.
I want to encourage the Action Writers amongst us to add to this idea so we can have a common, shared way of building Action interfaces which are far nicer to look at, and more intuitive by design than Freeway can currently offer. Hopefully, other experienced Action writers can look at it, and suggest or even contribute improvements.
Be aware - this is NOT an Action that you can download and use. It’s for developmental and experimental purposes only. Even though I am releasing this here, it’s not currently for reuse, and any changes should be added to the project and posted here.
2 Actions in this project:
- Applescript launcher [v. na]
- Project Files [v. na]
