PreFab UI Actions 1.0

PreFab and Bill Cheeseman have completed the first version of UI Actions, which lets you bind AppleScripts to be triggered by user interface events in accessible applications. This sounds incredibly useful, but at the moment I have few ideas for how to use it. Perhaps it could be used to add BBEdit-style backup functionality to other applications. (Each time you save a document, BBEdit saves a dated copy of it, providing a kind of transient version control.)

Also released today is version 1.3 of PreFab’s excellent UI Browser. The mechanics of purchasing from PreFab haven’t always been easy. Buying Player entailed filling out a text-based form and submitting it via e-mail. PreFab now has an eSellerate store, which should make buying much easier.

py2app 0.1

Bob Ippolito:

Even at this early stage, it’s probably the most advanced python packaging utility out there with regard to dependency analysis. It’s at a “works for me and the two other people that have tried it” stage. It’s not particularly documented, and I don’t have time to document it today, but you should be able to get along given the examples.

__FILE__ and __LINE__ in Python

Ned Batchelder shows how to use sys._getframe() to get the current (or calling) filename, line, and function in Python. In C, this happens at compile-time. Practically everything in Python happens at runtime, so this is slower, but you can also do things like inspect the local variables in the stack frames.