Interface builder, running script when app opens

Question

Hi!
I am trying to expand my wake script, so I have thrown it into xcode. What my wake script does is that it opens itunes and start to slowly turn up the volume, then it updates my ipod and does a few other things.
Now this works great in script editor, I launch this app with a script which is launched by iCal.
The first thing I want to do in xcode is to have a "I am awake" button (also called cancel…). And the only way I have gotten this to work is to have the script like this:
on clicked theObject
beep
try
tell application "iTunes" to pause
end try
quit
end clicked
on activated theObject
-- the script.
end activated theObject
The reason for using activated is that this is the only handler that I have found that lets me push the cancel button. (If I for example try to use "on launched" the whole script will run, then I can push cancel, kinda defeats the purpose…).
Any ideas?
ahh, ****, it seems that even the activated handler doesn't work. It looks like I can push cancel, but I can't!
Message was edited by: Oystbjoe

Answer 1

Once you've pushed "buttonOne" you enter your "repeat" loop and never get out... which also means that your code never returns from your "on clicked" handler. As long as you're stuck inside your "on clicked" handler your app will not receive any more clicked events. Hence your app never gets notified of the second click on your "Cancel" button.
Your previous post indicates you are wanting to be able to start some process (ie your repeat loop) with "buttonOne" but then potentially cancel it before it completes. From a programming standpoint that's not always easy to do... with AppleScript or any other programming language. In some cases it can be fairly difficult. And even if it's not difficult it may not be straightforward.
One way you might be able to do this with AppleScript, depending on what your "processing" entails, is to make use of an "on idle" handler. Your "on idle" handler will be called automatically and periodically. By default "on idle" gets called every 30 seconds but you can change that by returning a positive number from your "on idle" that represents the number of seconds between calls.
Something like this might work, but it's going to depend on whether you can break the work you're wanting to do into chunks such that you can do a little bit at a time and potentially stop between chunks due to a click on the "cancel" button.
property doSomeProcessing : false
on clicked theObject
set n to name of theObject
if n = "butonOne" then
set doSomeProcesing to true
return
end if
if n = "cancel" then
set doSomeProcessing to false
return
end if
end clicked
on idle
if doSomeProcessing then
beep
-- or do a _small chunk_ of the actual work you want to do
end if
return 1
end idle
Basically your button clicks just turn a flag on or off indicating whether you need to be doing some processing or not. All of the actual processing is done in small chunks inside your "on idle" handler. So each time your idle handler gets called you check the value of the flag. If you're supposed to be doing some processing then you do a little bit of work and return. NOTE that the "return 1" statement in the "on idle" handler is what changes the default of every 30 seconds so that it gets called every second.
I created an AS Studio application with the code above. And I also created a separate plain vanilla AppleScript that tells the AS Studio to have one or the other of the buttons to "perform action" (as indicated in my earlier post). By running the plain vanilla AppleScript I'm able to trigger the AS Studio app to start/stop beeping every second. So whether or not you can do this mainly depends on what you're trying to accomplish and whether or not it can be broken into chunks that can be done within an idle handler.
Steve
PS - also note that in an AS Studio application you need to activate the "idle" handler in Interface Builder in a manner similar to how you activated the "clicked" handler for your buttons. Select the "Application" icon in the MainMenu.nib window then click the "idle" checkbox in the AppleScript Info Panel.