Howdy Reinhard, Steve, Randall, and WeatherCat AppleScript fans,
We are not that quick on the trigger, slow down.
Why pardner if you aren't quick on the draw - your' bones will glisten on the trail here in the ol' West!! Just sent you some translations that are indeed practicable, I think.
Well, thanks I appreciate that, but as I can state and Steve can corroborate, there is a
LOT of text in these 6 AppleScripts. I doubt you'll be able to produce anything more than
high-school student German if you have to be stuck in the straightjacket of having the weather data in the position where English phrases would require them. So the problem won't go away. It is only a matter of time before one of these AppleScripts would be beyond translation.
On the other side I second Steve: All things that can make AppleScript easier is welcome! But think about the following: We need to install WeatherCat (what else? ), Growl, now Smile... what comes next?
Well . . . . . . . . .
If you have to ask, what is running on my computer already has two other new goodies:
Lynxlet and
MtcMail. However, both are free and it appears I can just include them in the distribution of the AppleScripts themselves. Lynxlet is a version of the open-source Lynx web browser and I use it to get back error messages from web upload services like UK Met Office, PWS Weather, and WeatherBug. MtcMail is an alternative to scripting Apple Mail, thus eliminating the need to leave Apple Mail running all the time.
As I said, I've tried to avoid asking folks to install
Smile because it requires a separate installer. This folks would have to do in addition to installing my AppleScripts. However, I think it might be worth it for anyone interested in using AppleScripts because of the additional math functions. Unless you install
smile you won't have any way to compute things like: sin, log
10, and gamma. Should someone need to extend WeatherCat to preform some quick scientific calculation, these functions are essentially required. So it might be a good idea to have everyone who might ever use AppleScript, bite the bullet and install
Smile as well.
At the same time, Reinhard's points seem really important. These "AppleScripts" are rapidly outgrowing what AppleScript was really intended to do. I've been hoping for months to bite the bullet, learn Xcode and convert at least some of these scripts into WeatherCat extensions like the banner generator. Those extensions will be easily translatable because Xcode provides the proper facilities for such things.
It doesn't look that difficult to implement a way to provide reasonable localization of strings in AppleScript using the tools provided by
Smile. However, it is another investment in an environment that seems increasingly a dead-end.
So perhaps I should ask Reinhard and the other non-English WeatherCat users - how anxious are you to get access to the "goodies" associated with these AppleScripts? Some scripts like
WC Web Uploader are probably usable by anyone who knows enough English to get WeatherCat going in the first place. However, other scripts like
WC Temperature Rising and
WC Temperature Falling would be unpleasant to use outside of your native language. Is there enough interest in localized scripts for one more "band-aid" in AppleScript before changing to Xcode?
Once more: opinions solicited!!
Cheers, Edouard