I plan on delving into AppleScript in more depth very soon, but I do
suspect that your impressions are correct. I'd even go so far as to
say that it is likely that AppleScript would prove to be far more
powerful for VO users than Jaws Scripting, though this may take some
time. The tweaking of UI's is something that I believe could be
hugely beneficial, though I understand Greg's legal concerns. As a
developer of WIndows apps, I am really, really hoping that XCode 3,
supposedly being released with Leopard, will be more accessible.
On Apr 14, 2007, at 4:46 AM, Access Curmudgeon wrote:
So all this conversion has me thinking. I initially thought that one
advantage of JFW as compared to VO is the extensibility. There is a
whole industry that has grown up around writing Jaws scripts and a
couple people on this list wrote about earning a living with such
work. Greg wrote in how he can often tweak the UI to work better with
VO. Then I was thinking about AppleScript, how it is remarkably
powerful, more so than anything in Windows, and available for almost
all OS X applications. Apple also ships robust development tools with
the OS (but so far these are not compatible with VO). There are lots
more AppleScript authors than Jaws Scripters. So this prompts me to
ask a couple questions:
1) How long did the Jaws Script Writing shops take to appear to on
the scene?
2) Does, in fact, AppleScript offer VO users the same potential found
right now with JFW scripts?
I am guessing that the answer to (1) is several years, and that (2) is
a big fat YES! If this conclusion is correct (and please feel free to
shoot holes in the notion), the challenge then is how to jump start
the paid support services (and where to get the funding). We have had
a couple years now beating on 3rd party developers, and we are all
impatient for things to move faster.
