All this for a script that will be used no more than a handful of times, to restore long-replaced data from the nineties. It’s time to quote Douglas Adams again.

I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. Ten seconds, I tell myself, is ten seconds. Time is valuable and ten seconds’ worth of it is well worth the investment of a day’s happy activity working out a way of saving it. — Douglas Adams (Last Chance to See^•)

In A HyperCard Time Machine I wrote that I also seriously considered writing the script as a JavaScript (JXA) app. In fact, I did write the script as a JavaScript app. It was a toss-up to the end which version I was going to use, so they’re both fully-working versions.

One advantage the JXA version has is not requiring old-school, BASIC-style manipulation of strings to extract the current card number and the total card count from the window title. Instead of grabbing the location of the final slash, which required serious gymnastics in AppleScript, the JavaScript solution can use a regular expression that is both shorter and more reliable:

JXA also doesn’t use tell blocks. It places the application in a variable, and the things we want to tell it to do can be handled at any point without worrying about how a tell block affects the syntax. At the beginning of the app, I did:

This gave me the current application and System Events. The current application is necessary for dialog with the user, which is why I’ve also included the Standard Additions on it. The Standard Additions include Display Dialog and Choose Folder.

Because JXA doesn’t use tell blocks, it is easier to place the request for the destination folder after the check to see if HyperCardPreview is running and has at least one open window.¹

Where the JXA solution falls down, and, ultimately why I decided not to use it, is that it contains some very odd behavior. The lesser of them is that there is no equivalent to Quoted Form Of in JXA. That’s not a killer, because a functional equivalent can easily be added.

Someone with more knowledge of the command line can probably tell me why double-apostrophes are necessary to properly escape internal apostrophes.

Interestingly, JXA also doesn’t contain a POSIX path of equivalent. It doesn’t need it. It appears to use the POSIX path by default. Simply converting a path to a string results in the path being a POSIX path.

The above will provide the path to the folder using slashes rather than drive name and colons. This is likely to cause some problems in other cases, but in this case that’s what I need anyway, since the actual screenshot is handled by /usr/sbin/screenshot.

More weirdly, this fails:

That’s even though this does not fail:

That will successfully cause HyperCardPreview’s Browse menu to drop down. The solution is to use the apparently-not-equivalent syntax of:

That’s how I referred to the menus anyway in the AppleScript version. This is a weird discrepancy, but not a critical one. The same discrepancy appears in AppleScript. This will pull down the menu:

But click menu item "Go to Next Card" of menu bar item "Browse" of menu bar 1 “Can’t get menu item "Go to Next Card"”. The similar syntax click menu item "Go to Next Card" of menu "Browse" of menu bar 1 is required, just as in JavaScript.

I first attempted to do the screenshots using System Events to invoke the screenshot with CMD-SHIFT-4 (or CMD-$). I abandoned this approach because the resulting files didn’t have useful names and because they were all deposited on the Desktop. But the technique does show how sometimes the JavaScript and AppleScript versions coincide nearly exactly.

The AppleScript version was:

It’s simple enough to understand, and the JavaScript version is just as simple:²

Sending keyCode 13 or keyCode 10 at the end fails, but using the Unix equivalent of AppleScript’s return variable works fine.

I suspect that some people will see the AppleScript version as cleaner, and some the JavaScript version. If you decide you prefer the JavaScript solution, it, like the AppleScript version, needs to be saved as an application, and for the same reason: you need to grant it permission to control applications on your computer and do screen recording without annoying messages. Every time you update the app, manually remove it from both the Accessibility list and the Screen Recording list under the Privacy pane of the Security & Privacy settings, then re-add it by dragging the app in to each list. See the parent post for more details.

This is probably thinking far too much, for a script that is rarely going to be used—after all, I’m not creating new HyperCard stacks nowadays—about whether or not to switch out the AppleScript version for the JXA version. But it was interesting. There are advantages to each; ultimately I prefer the readability of the AppleScript version, despite the more complicated string manipulation in AppleScript and the use of variables in place of tell blocks in JXA.

The main reason for that is likely that this app is more about communication and less about data manipulation. AppleScript excels at the former.

Here is the full code: