Work In Progress
Here are a couple of projects that I'm working on. Some will be released for free; I haven't decided about the others.
Powerfully Simple Frontier
Frontier is free, check it out! Frontier 4.1 broke new ground with a great new menubar and a very useful online (and downloadable) manual. (It also included my enhanced command-double-click behavior!) Frontier 4.2 offers many important enhancements to the website building features (though this site is still built with custom scripts).Meanwhile, I think Frontier could be even easier -- and more powerful. I've added a "Help" menu for easy access to the many help features that are available, but otherwise somewhat hidden. It includes adds a cross reference for easily locating verbs by "topic" or keyword. The next menu is "Cool", a collection that streamlines common scripting tasks. I use two new Find menu items (with command-key shortcuts) almost daily: a prompted find (with preset options) where the dialog doesn't stay in the way and a prompted Replace All (in the rest of the frontmost window). I've extended my enhanced2click suite (now included with Frontier) with a smart "Jump" feature. There are many more features for scripters of all levels.
The second half of the project is a suite of Simple verbs. There are lots of little verbs that give Frontier a more consistent "scripting interface", e.g. file.getModified; many more that combine a series of common steps into one verb, e.g. file.newTextFile. Other new verbs package useful tasks, e.g. file.getUniqueName to add a file in sequence or just create a temporary file without overwriting the old one. Lots of verbs make it easier to script Frontier, e.g. table.compare or window.frontmostType (which works around 3 cases where the obvious approach yields an error).
As with the interface, I believe the Simple verbs are equally useful to the most advanced script writer. One of the reasons that I'm not planning to charge anything is that I want them to be universally available. Instead of reinventing the wheel in all of my suites, I want to call on them as a standard package. I hope other scripters will find the verbs equally useful.
I'm not ready to post this suite for general use, as it could still change significantly. (In fact, it alreadh has. The release of Frontier 4.1 let me eliminate a whole menu.) E-mail me if you have time to offer feedback and would like a copy for testing. Beginners welcome; your feedback is needed most. (That is, please don't think that you lack the expertise to offer feedback. I can no longer put myself completely in the shoes of someone who is just learning Frontier.)
Eudora Extras
I prefer the digest form of busy mailing lists (like MACSCRPT). Once I finally upgraded to the commercial version of Eudora (for filtering), I began to take advantage of its support for Frontier menu sharing. I can now select a message in the digest and either reply to the list or directly to the author. Though rough, I should probably post these scripts....
Eudora to FileMaker
Check out Mail2FM by Preston Holmes (presumably on the LTODBS, which of course can be reached from ScriptWeb. It's not exactly what I need but I haven't had the time to either modify it or enhance mine. My original notes follow:Eudora is a great package, but I really need an e-mail database. "What did I tell this person last time?" "Didn't someone else report something like that?" I need to be able to search on multiple keywords in specific fields, see a subset of the data (without refiling), add notes, etc. My very rough suite (set of Frontier scripts) offers two approaches for parsing: loop through the mailboxes with "get" verbs, or parse the file directly (much faster, but risks file format changes). In either case, it writes to a text file. (Not required, but more general purpose: maybe I'll actually find something better than FIleMaker one day.) There are also two approaches for FileMaker import: a standard import (faster, but locks up the machine), and creating each record with a verb (slower, but runs in the background).
The scripts attempt to be smart about which fields to keep and which to toss; not a trivial task given the wide variety of e-mail headers. (Read: I haven't figured out the best approach to the problem.) There's also an annoying bug that puts extra data on the end of a field; haven't taken the time to track it. Finally, the scripts are very dependent on a certain database structure (for speed); not sure that's the best approach for a public release.
There's some chance I will improve this suite and turn it into a product. Maybe, maybe not. The scripting isn't difficult; though there are a few things that take some time....
FileMaker to Eudora
Given lots of e-mail messages in FileMaker, I'd really like to reply and forward right from there. I've just started to put this package together.
DocExtras
The Frontier suite included with Player contains 4 different summaries of the available verbs: by Keyword, by Category, Alphabetical and Frontier's traditional Verb Summary format. These "views" and portions of the DocServer docs (e.g. See Also) were assembled with the help of my docExtras suite. Most people have more fun writing scripts than docs, but if you want to put together thorough Frontier documentation for something, I'd be happy to send you this suite. It isn't polished: there's no menu and many things are hard-coded, though they should be easy to adapt.
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