Manila Envelope – Part 9b

One additional thing about Manila Envelope — it’s a little bit of a paradigm shift from my scripts. I think the change is for the better.

With TextEdit2Blog, I started out trying to write a universal “save to the Web” script menu item for all text applications. The script was supposed to grab the selected text from the frontmost application and post it to the web. I soon realized that this just wasn’t feasible. There was no way to address all text applications universally–some had a “selection” property and some didn’t, and each exposed it differently. I decided instead to tie the script to one easily available application with a simple AppleScript Dictionary.

With AppleScript Studio, I don’t think this makes sense any more. It’s too easy to slap a text view onto the user interface, add some menu items, and essentially have all the functionality of TextEdit inside the app. Besides, as someone pointed out to me, copy & paste and drag and drop are pretty universally understood ways to get data into different places.

So Manila Envelope will have more of a text-based application feel to it. Cool. Now it just needs an icon. Anyone with skills want to share?