Enhanced Applets

Enhanced applets provide an alternative means of deploying an AppleScript script as a standalone application. Script Debugger’s enhanced applets are particularly useful when creating droplets (AppleScript scripts that process dropped files), but there are advantages for applets as well.

Drop-Target Window

Enhanced droplets present a drop-target window where your users can drag & drop the files they want your script to process. This makes your user’s experience with your script that much better. The drop target window only accepts the file types you specify for your script.

Spotlight Document Searching

Enhanced droplets contain a version of Script Debugger’s Open Quickly code which allows users of your droplet to perform Spotlight searches for files they want to process with your script directly from the applet. Additionally, discontinuous searching is provided allowing users to type parts of a search term and immediately get results.

AppleScript File Filtering

In addition to supporting Uniform Type Identifiers and filename extensions for filtering the types of files which can be opened by a droplet, you can implement AppleScript-based filtering to ensure only acceptable files are processed. This AppleScript filtering is used by the enhanced applet UI to indicate when dropped files are acceptable.

Quit Handling

A limitation to standard applets is that the user can quit the applet at any time and your script has no way of cleaning up after itself. Enhanced applets let you respond to your user quitting the applet and allow you to (a) deny the quit operation if the script is performing a task that should not be interrupted or (b) stop and clean up a long running task before letting the applet shut down.

Modernized User Interface

In addition to the drop target window provided for droplet scripts, enhanced applets also display non-blocking sheet versions of the `display dialog`, `display alert`, `choose file`, `choose folder`, `choose file name` and `choose from list` commands. its a small thing, but it makes your user’s experience with your script a little bit nicer.

Automated Software Updates

Enhanced applets can take advantage of the Sparkle software update framework to perform automated software updates. This allows you to easily distribute updates to your scripts to your users.

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