Farbflash

Here's a little thing, that I wrote some time ago to use a socket connection with the MU xtra from a "faked" message window. while I was writing it, I added support for shell xtra and lingo too :-)

It does some things, that the normal message window does not:

• autocomplete
• history
• aliases
• return in the middle of a line
• multiline statements
• syntax coloring
• switch to shell mode (this is very OSX biased, as I don't spend much time on PC. especially keeping track of the current pwd and prepending every call with a cd is useful as the shell xtra starts every call "from scratch" at /)
• switch to ftp/ssh/http mode using the MU xtra (BTW, does anybody know, if there is some voodoo that allows passive ftp with the MU xtra ? I wasn't able to do that)

it's just like a rough lingo fake of the terminal.app, which I have become so used lastly, that I constantly do silly things like hitting return in the middle of a line in the messwin and pulling my hair, that I need to restart the movie I am working on *again* :-)

btw. I didn't find a way around this specific problem. I thought catching a script error with the alerthook would prevent my movie to stop execution, if my alert handler returns true, but that doesn't seem to be the case. but maybe there is just some tricky part I am missing.

feel free to proof me wrong ;-)

but don't waste too much time with a fake message window miaw, it turned out that editable text in a authoring tool miaw is simply to slow and too quirky to be of much use. furthermore the cpu hogging is another reason to stick with the standard message window.

Anyway, here's it:
lingoMessWin_beta.zip

NEW VERSION:
myMessWin1.4.zip

There is also a new Readme file

Please note, that this version is not the most recent one. I transferred further development of the tool to an open source trac project, where you can always find the most recent version in trunk. see this blog post for further infos.

For the latest version of the tool check the trac project page at: http://www.farbflash.org/trac/myMessWin . After creating an account (I need that to keep spam robots away) you can go to the subversion repository -> "Browse Source" and checkout trunk as single zip file by directing your browser to http://www.farbflash.org/trac/myMessWin/browser/trunk and clicking on "Download in other formats: Zip Archive" at the bottom of the page

Comments:

Friday, 4.April 2008 09:10:03 alex wrote:

Fixed a bug, where xtra instances would throw and error on autocomplete. Now autocomplete also works for xtra instances and global scripting xtras keywords are also scanned at start.
Make sure to updatethe version 1.4.
Will need to put better version checking into the movies themselves in the future.