Wow, lots of AppleScript mail lately. I'll try to get to most of the points
I can address:
On 11/3/2000 11:32 AM, "Bill Cheeseman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> And there's something wrong with categories. A contact's Category and Links
> properties both return lists, yet you have to jump through an extra hoop or
> two to get at the Category list (for example, in some contexts I have to
> refer to "its category" while I don't have to do that for Links in the same
> context).
Can you give an example? I know that whose clauses are broken, but what
else isn't behaving as you'd expect.
> And Email Addresses for a contact returns a list of simple strings giving
> the e-mail addresses, with no way to find out which are associated with
> "Work" and which with "Home" -- associations that are settable in the GUI.
I added this sort of support to Emailer 2.0v3, so it's possible. The
problem is that I don't think I can do it without changing the dictionary in
a way that won't break old scripts. It's something we should fix though.
> Paul wrote:
> This brings up a remaining limitation in Entourage scripting: you can't
> otherwise set anything as 'styled text' (i.e. our HTML), even though
> Entourage's Unicode text implementation really should permit this to be
> implemented. ({Please, Dan: I'm going to keep bugging you on this one.) So
> altering any message text, then resetting it, always loses HTML, except with
> 'reply to' event. You can get around this in draft windows by setting
> selection if your DEFAULT settings are HTML (but whose are?), which will
> then give it to you in your default font, no styling. This remains the only
> way to soft wrap outgoing messages, a limitation.
Actually, Unicode really has nothing to do with styling. That's just for
international support. There's not really an easy way to support this such
that the text is easily manipulated via AppleScript. If it returned the raw
HTML text, then you'd have to parse the HTML to add text. There's a styled
text type, but it's not something you can manipulate from AppleScript.
Actually, support for the full text suite would solve this, but that is a
huge amount of work which isn't likely to happen soon. I'm open to any
other suggestions.
The softwrapping issue has been discussed in a separate thread.
> Bug with 'street address 2': it doesn't appear anywhere when you set it. On
> the other hand you can put as many returns and separate lines as you want
> into 'street address' and they do appear in the UI.
This should be removed from the scripting addition.
> That's all I can think of for now, but I think that about covers it. I may
> have left something out. As you can see if you look at the Outlook Express
> dictionary, almost all the problems are with the new Entourage features.
> Please don't forget that Dan Crevier seems to do this all by himself after
> he has (it seems) almost single-handedly created most of the features in the
> UI first, plus all the underlying programming of the interlocking database
> (well, I'm sure Jud Spencer must do a great deal of that part!). On a tight
> time pressure, it's quite understandable that they needed to get the UI
> right first before scripting the equivalents, then it gets too late to fix
> scripting after all the UI fixes are put in, up to the last minute. You have
> no idea how hard it was for them to get UI details of the Calendar right in
> the beta process. Dan is absolutely committed to getting scripting right,
> and we keep dealing with these things in the ongoing beta list. He intends
> to put them right in later fix releases. It is Dan who is responsible for
> the wonderful object model scripting in Entourage and Outlook Express which
> is hardly matched by any major computer firm's application out there. (I'm
> sure that Tex-Edit Plus hardly has the same commercial pressures as
> Microsoft puts on its programmers, and can take more time over applescript.)
> Please report anything you find on this list, too. I apologize for not
> finding some of these things earlier so they could be fixed before first
> release, but 1) I only found some of them when people ask for things on this
> list, after release, which I never thought to try before, and 2) I did find
> many of them right away when the betas came out, but there was still no time
> for them to be fixed before release.
Whoah, you are giving me way to much credit here. We have a large
development team that is responsible for Entourage. jud is the database
expert, and I had very little to do with that.
I am a big proponent of AppleScript component on the team, and am
responsible for a lot of it (I was hired as a contractor to do the OE 4.0
scripting support before joining Microsoft permanently), but other
developers have helped out in their areas.
AppleScript doesn't always get the highest priority internally since, but we
do try to get things right. It's hard to find all of the bugs and omissions
in the scripting support because it's hard to think of all of the things
people will do with it, but all of you scripters on the list really help.
Special thanks go to Paul for pointing out lots of issues during the beta
period, although we couldn't get to them all.
So, please keep the feedback coming! I love to see all the great stuff
everyone is doing with AppleScript to customize the way they use Entourage,
and hope we can help facilitate more cool stuff in the future.
Dan
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