The versions of the Finder and the Finder Scripting Extension provided in this release are preliminary and pre-alpha. The events defined in the Finder Suite 1.1, the constants defined in FinderRegistry.h, and the element classes recognized by the Finder are all subject to change. DO NOT DEPEND ON ANY FORM OF COMPATABILITY with the events defined in this release. You have been warned; violators will be broken.
What is Reality?
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In some cases, the Scriptable Finder might not behave as documented in the Finder Suite 1.1. In almost all cases, the truth lies in the documentation, not the code, and you should expect future versions of the Scriptable Finder to change to reflect this.
Known Problems
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There are a number of known bugs in this release. They include (in no particular order):
• None of the file sharing commands are scriptable or recordable.
• None of the finder control panels are scriptable or recordable.
• Application partition sizes cannot be scripted or recorded.
• Outline views cannot be scripted or recorded.
• pFileType / pCreatorType properties do not work.
• The whose clause 'every item whose name contains "e"' does not work, but the equivalent clause 'every item of desktop whose name contains "e"' does work.
• Results are not returned for many events (e.g. create new folder, delete file, put away, move, and make alias).
• "make <class> with properties" doesn't work, because the result of the creation are not known to the Finder Scripting Extension.
• "make folder" doesn't work if the direct parameter is a window. Unfortunately, this is how the "New Folder" command is recorded. (Delete the clause "container window of" from the recorded event and it works).
• The script command 'for x in every item of folder "example"' does not work due to a bug in the way the Finder treats elements of an "every" token. To work around this problem, assign 'every item of folder "example"' to a variable (i.e., 'set var to every item of folder "example"'), and then execute 'for x in every item of var'
• The Scriptable Finder uses a 50K heap to build its result events in. If this heap fills up, a reply cannot be returned. This will have some impact on recording operations involving a large number of files.
• Long Finder operations (e.g. copying large files) can cause AppleScript to time out, as the Finder never resets the AppleEvent timeout timer.
• Certain events (e.g. Empty trash, move, copy and erase disk) can bring up unwanted dialog boxes.
• If you Get Info on the application Toy Surprise, you will find that you cannot change its application partition size. This is caused by a Finder bug, not anything wrong with Toy Surprise.
• The gestalt selector gestaltScriptableFinder is not removed if the Scriptable Finder quits.
• Move and copy do not always work (if, for example, source objects from different containers are specified)
• Items are not repositioned when moved or copied into a new container--they remain at the same offset from (0,0) that they occupied in their previous container.
• pVisible of cWindow is not implemented.
• pInsertionLocation and pClipboard of cApplication are not implemented.
• The trash class is called "trashcan" and the desktop is called "finder desktop" in order to avoid conflict with the properties named "trash" and "desktop", respectively.
• The property pIconBitmap will not provide a PICT of the icon; you always get an icon family.
• Many properties of the desktop (e.g. name) cannot be accessed.
