voodoo2palm (Super Lazy Man's Edition) | Main | Here it's just the opposite
August 2, 2004
Bird Nose, Mammal Body, Unix Heart
Sveinbjorn Thordarson’s Platypus got a look while I was poking at voodoo2palm:
- Build a GUI launcher for any shell script written in Python, Perl, Ruby or several others
- require admin privileges to run your new applet
- show a progress bar while the script runs
- make it a droplet (with the dropped file being passed to argv)
- e-z custom icons
Looks kind of cool. I’ve got a BBEdit blogging script that’s been collecting dust that could really use the handy progress meter Platypus offers.
Elsewhere
I’m still trying to figure out the vagaries of AppleScript’s “do shell script”. It seems to truly hate being run within a tell block, and it had some awful side effects for voodoo2palm, including a funny little bug that periodically choked the rest of the script before it could complete exporting the pad, which meant there was sometimes an index to crawl and sometimes not for no obvious reason. Sometimes it pays to RTFM instead of putting stupid little sleep directives to keep a script from tripping over its own feet, I guess.
And I’m still trying to figure out why the graphics in a pad aren’t being rendered by Plucker. I suspect Apple’s Python might be missing PIL but I haven’t investigated any further. “The boards” seem to say as much.
Comments
What format do the images have to be in for plucker?
Posted by: August Mueller at August 3, 2004 12:26 PM
Well, there doesn't seem to be a specific format besides "anything PIL (the Python Imaging Library) can handle." I've managed to use both jpegs and pngs from the Plucker Desktop app.
The problem is that OS X's Python seems to be missing PIL.
The OS X Plucker Desktop app packs a custom-built PIL that travels around in its app bundle along with a Plucker parser that's pointed at that custom PIL. So the trick to getting images to work in a Plucker document distilled on OS X is getting PIL into the mix. I wrote one of the Plucker Desktop authors and asked for some insight into how to pull this off with voodoo2palm.
I was tipped to the problem in this mail:
http://www.mail-archive.com/plucker-dev@rubberchicken.org/msg05765.html
There's also the possibility of using netpbm, but since the Plucker Desktop people already solved the problem with PIL, I'm more inclined to exercise my laziness gene than my industrious curiosity one. :-)
Posted by: mph ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.puddingbowl.org/puddingtime/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 3, 2004 12:36 PM