@tfdesign said:
John, would you be so kind as to explain what a "Mac editing Bridge" actually is?
I'm sure if you explained what you are trying to achieve in a clearer, more 'laymans terms' kind of way, there would be far more interest.
Tom
Hi Tom,
If you have an interest in how to make or fix rubies to use on a PC there are a couple of 'Bridges' that you can use between SketchUp and a more familiar or powerful script editor that you fancy.
Their called bridges because they allow two way communication with SU to varying degrees.
That means your not guessing as much, because you can check more often in a given time frame.
No such 'Bridge' exists for Mac-SU, so you do a lot of copy/pasting between the external editor and Ruby Console.
A second issue then arises is that SU has some limits to how many 'lines' you can copy/paste in before it 'bogs-down' and you need to 'purge' Ruby Console.
Of course there's no Mac equivilent of the PC purge ruby, so you need to quit, restart, close the buggy start page, open a new page, open Ruby Console and then start copy/pasting again until it's slow or 'bug-splat's'.
In a single session, you might this 100's of times, and it's a pain.
So, I started playing around with Applescript to ease some of my pain, and found I can get it to do quite a bit in SU through UI [user imput] manipulation.
That means, if there's a Menu Item, a Window Button, a Shortcut Key, etc... you can click it with applescript. (I highlight can because the how can be tricky)
SU also uses a self preservation ruby, so some thing's can't be done from inside (an example is that a plugin in SU can't tell SU to quit, unless it does it through a separate external process)
So, while I've been improving on these scripts/apps for my own use, I just thought there may be others interested.
The 'new with my toolbars' and the 'kill button' alone would make life easier if you open SU more than twice a day and use 'beta' plugins.
The next step is to get applescript to switch out the plugins before starting SU, so you have a button for drawing tools, one for advanced editing, one for prepping renders, or whatever.
Applescript is brilliant at moving files around for processing in the background, so there's a lot of potential once we have a library of what works.
Personally I've spent a great deal of time looking for 'cross platform' solutions when there may actually be very good built in tools for many of the problems.
Every Mac owner has the very powerful 'Script Editor' and 'Automator' as standard and can upgrade to 'Xcode' from their instal disc's if they wish, so I think it's worth a look...
cheers for your interest, I'll post the update for the app on the other 'Mac' thread for now.
john
