They may have a good argument there =). There is something to be said
for not exposing low level OS routines to a high level API. It
prevents very messy things from happening to your machine, even at the
hands of the "good" people.
With that said, perhaps there are other ways of approaching your
problem. For example, suppose you want to know if a file had been
modified with a certain name. Could you not do something like (NOTE:
this is untested pseudo-code)
global lastCheckTime
on watchFolder tFolder
set the directory to tFolder
put the detailed files into tFiles
filter tFiles with "*Randall*"
sort tFiles by item 3 of each -- modification date
repeat while (item 3 of line 1 of tFiles > lastCheckTime)
put line 1 of tFiles into someFile
doSomething someFile
delete line 1 of tFiles
end repeat
put the seconds into lastCheckTime
send "watchFolder tFolder" to this stack in 1 second
end watchFolder
All you would be doing is parsing the raw text from "the detailed
files". You can zip through an awful lot of files in just a few
milliseconds that way, and the file modification time is there for the
taking. It's not an event notification, granted, but might just be a
practical way to poll for file changes. I'm sure you could monitor
many thousands of files this way w/o too much overhead, and it would
work cross-platform.
Well there is the rub. Apple, hates the idea that somone would
tammie into the file level event loop. I think the security issues
are scarry to a company that tells people that says its OS doesnt
attract malware. I have talked to top apple OS people who act as if
i am hitler for even asking.
Randall
-----Original Message-----
From: "Brian Yennie" <[email protected]>
To: "How to use Revolution" <[email protected]>
Sent: 1/19/2009 6:19 PM
Subject: Re: externals
I think it's probably two of those things - the OS doesn't like to
expose certain things as much as others, and also programs like Rev
have to pick and choose what they support. Why not do the OS level
research, and find out how hard it would be to create an external?
Yes, I want it all! And I want it easy. Things like this can be
attacked at the application level... which would help ME... but it
will only help the whole rev community when it is an integral part
of the rev native event and command loop. This is why I talk of
these things on this and other lists... to garner interest... to
plant seeds... to grow memes in the heads of others.
Maybe Rev and programs like it just chase the low hanging fruit...
maybe this is an OS problem... maybe we live in a world where the
computer is a static device that waits for our commands... and maybe
that precludes the kinds of event driven automation that I seek. We
have no experience with it so we don't ask for it.
Randall
On Jan 19, 2009, at 1:17 PM, Brian Yennie wrote:
Randall,
Unfortunately it seems you are looking for a high-level API to take
care of a very low level job. There simply isn't an API for
everything. You are probably going to have to get your hands dirty
in C if this is your goal. If you know the OS APIs you want to tap
into, you could work on building externals in C. If you don't, time
to do some research =). You will definitely need to build separate
externals for each operating system as well.
Maybe not what you were hoping for, but I hope that helps.
QuickKeys is cool... but it doesn't offer finder events as
triggers for the execution of macros. There is no way, for
instance, to tell it:
When a user saves any file, from any application, and the name
contains "Entropy", then save an alias at "Hard Drive: My Entropy
Docs:"
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