🚀 go-pugleaf

I was working on a script recently and conceived of the idea that having the ability to have more push buttons would be a good thing, so you could add more buttons should you need to. For example, look at all the buttons in the PDF Export Presets dialog.

The other UI things that I find myself missing are:

1. The ability to update a dialog while it is open. For example, I wanted to create a dialog that displayed just two pop-ups: Font and Style. The idea was that it would display only the Fonts that are actually in use in the document -- that's easy -- but the problem is that the styles are different for each font, so you need to update the styles list each time the Font pop-up is operated. [Perhaps some kind of mechanism where a function could be attached to a control?]

2. Some mechanism for allowing the user to control activities while a script is running. Ways to stop a script that is less drastic than force quitting the application would be great (by the way, if your script does lengthy Find/Change operations and you hit Command-period while one is running, it looks as though this will stop both the operation and the script, but generally, once you kick off a script you have to wait for it to end).

I see two needs related to this second issue: (a) The ability for the user to stop a script at any moment, e.g., by clicking on a button on the Scripts palette, (b) The ability for a script to detect that the user has done something (pressed the Caps Lock key, for instance) and for it to take action accordingly.

In AppleScript, these kinds of things are available through external add-ins, but in JavaScript there does not seem to be a way to do anything like this.

The one other UI thing I've struggled with is status reporting. I end up doing things to my documents just so that I can see that the script is actually making progress. When a script needs hours to run, some idea that it is actually doing something is very reassuring to the user.

Dave