On 10/20/00 12:12 AM, "Allen Watson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> on 10/17/2000 12:01 PM, Paul Berkowitz at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> You may not know, but you can now in Entourage even
>> set selection to one or more messages or contacts (with list braces) with
>> the message pane or address book displayed.
>
> Would you explain that in a bit more detail? I'm not sure what you mean, and
> I figure there are others as fuzzy-minded as I am.
Aha, certainly. It was just an aside there.
It was very frustrating in OE that you could never select or 'set selection
to' a message in the message pane, or a contact in the Address Book. Select
in the sense of "highlight". You also can't 'set displayed message of front
window" to anything: it's read-only.
So in OE you can never end a script by selecting the new message, or the new
contact, you've just made. In OE, say you delete a message and make an
altered one to replace it. Well, the message _below_ the original one is
selected and shows up in the preview pane too if you have it open.
Completely irrelevant and confusing. If you then expect the user to do
something with the mew message, they have to find it first.
In Entourage, you just say
set selection to {theMsg}
or
set selection to {theContacts}
and it will highlight them in the correct window pane of the main window,
or if the front window is already the correct one (like the Address Book in
its own window) even if that pane wasn't open before. (If the main window is
in front, the displayed feature might have been something else, but changes
now to accommodate the script.)
The reason list braces are used is the same as for when there's only one
"current message": it's to be able to accommodate several. You can set
selection to many ,messages or contacts if you want:
set selection to (every message of folder "Inbox" whose time sent is
greater than (current date - (1 * days)
will get you the same as:
set selection to {incoming message id 1111, incoming message 1112, �}
and they will all be highlighted. They have to be elements of a particular
folder this way, but I bet you can do it in a Custom View for messages of
different folders, and they will all be highlighted. I haven't tried it
there yet.
You could always "set selection" in text windows to write from the insertion
point. But now you can select messages in folders and custom views, and
contacts and groups in the Address Book too. Just remember the list braces.
I asked for this, so I'm very grateful to Dan for obliging.
(You can't set selection to a folder, but you don't need to, because "set
displayed feature of main window to folder "Inbox"' already does that, and
you can never select more than one at a time anyway.)
A few little things to look out for:
address book 1 (there's no 2 or 3 at the moment) is a real entity, and you
can set its names of custom fields and dates.
You can open address book 1, main window, and progress window even when
they're not "existing". This, and anything to do with them will work in all
international versions and all identities: you don't need to know the
window's name.
You can get the displayed feature of the main window even when it's address
book 1, or any particular Custom View, but unfortunately NOT when it's one
of the calendar, or the main Tasks, Notes, or Custom Views pages. So we
still need "try" for displayed feature of main window!
You can delete individual group entries of a group, without having to
destroy the group, thank goodness.
There are fantastic time-saver commands of reply to, forward, redirect and
resend, with the option of "without opening window" to make a fully-fledged
outgoing message in the drafts folder: otherwise it's a draft window on the
screen. 'reply to' in particular has parameters for almost everything you an
do "in real life", including replying 'with html text', attributions of
various sorts, insertion point placement, replying with entire message text,
or nothing (default is always what your app preferences are set to: very
good). Unfortunately NOT replying with selected text quoted. We've got to
get that next time, I hope. etc etc. I was able to remove about 500 lines
form CC All and BCC All scripts. Watch out: there's a bug with 'resend
without opening window' that crashes Entourage, plain 'resend' is OK. I
found it a long time ago, bit not early enough for it to be fixed. (Again
'resend' was a late addition at my request. I use it with all the message s
i send here beginning "On 10/18/00 I wrote:", and it works, more-or-less
with HTML. Still no way to handle HTML indents nor anything specific with
HTML, nor HTML in new messages. Not until we get (if we ever do) styled text
implemented, which I hope we do.
I'm finding funny little lapses in the new commands: event doesn't have
"remind date and time" although task does, but task can't script a due time,
There are quite a few unimplemented 'whose clauses' in several of the new
elements' properties. The worst is, as popped up yesterday 'every contact
whose category is' anything. Also start time and end time of events. You
can't the children of contact. And one or two more I forget.
So there are great improvements and bug fixes to the OE classes and events,
and a bunch of new bugs in the new terms. To be expected� But its lots of
fun, and allows most things you can do in the app to be scripted. More to
come, I'm sure.
--
Paul Berkowitz
--
To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To search the archives:
<http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
