applescript with loop stops (on Yosemite) when user interacts with application - applescript

Forgive me if this turns out to be a dumb question, I've been writing cocoa apps for a long time but have only recently started to make them scriptable.
Scripting with this particular app is working well. But if the script has a loop like this...
tell application "myApplication"
repeat
set someProperty of someObject to someValue
delay 0.5
end repeat
end tell
(this is actually a script to cycle the colour of a connected bulb, so it does want to be an infinite loop.)
... no problem when everything's running on Mavericks. But on Yosemite, if the user interacts with myApplication's UI then things stop working. The script continues running (without things happening in myApplication) for a while before the script stops with a timeout (-1712)
The 'setter' for someProperty in the someObject class returns void and I've confirmed with messages to the console that it returns correctly every time it's called.
Is this behaviour expected? Is there something obvious I'm doing wrong?

Related

MacOS not responding to MPRemoteCommandCenter commands in the background

I am writing an application for my own purposes that aims to get play pause events no matter what is going on in the system. I have gotten this much working
let commandCenter = MPRemoteCommandCenter.shared()
commandCenter.togglePlayPauseCommand.isEnabled = true
commandCenter.togglePlayPauseCommand.addTarget { (MPRemoteCommandEvent) -> MPRemoteCommandHandlerStatus in
print("Play Pause Command")
return .success
}
commandCenter.nextTrackCommand.isEnabled = true
commandCenter.nextTrackCommand.addTarget { (MPRemoteCommandEvent) -> MPRemoteCommandHandlerStatus in
print("NextTrackCommand")
return .success
}
commandCenter.previousTrackCommand.isEnabled = true
commandCenter.previousTrackCommand.addTarget { (MPRemoteCommandEvent) -> MPRemoteCommandHandlerStatus in
print("previousTrackCommand")
return .success
}
commandCenter.playCommand.isEnabled = true
commandCenter.playCommand.addTarget { (MPRemoteCommandEvent) -> MPRemoteCommandHandlerStatus in
print("playCommand")
return .success
}
MPNowPlayingInfoCenter.default().playbackState = .playing
Most of those methods are there because apparently you will not get any notifications without having nextTrackCommand or previousTrackCommand or playCommand implemented.
Anyways my one issue is that as soon as you open another application that uses audio these event handlers stop getting called and I cant find a way to detect and fix this.
I would normally try doing AVAudioSession things to state this as a background application however that does not seem to work. Any ideas on how I can get playpause events no matter what state the system is in?
I would like to be able to always listen for these events OR get an indication of when someone else has taken control of the audio? Perhaps even be able to re-subscribe to these play pause events.
There's an internal queue in the system which contains all the audio event subscribers. Other applications get on top of it when you start using them.
I would like to be able to always listen for these events
There's no API for that but there's a dirty workaround. If I understand your issue correctly, this snippet:
MPNowPlayingInfoCenter.default().playbackState = .paused
MPNowPlayingInfoCenter.default().playbackState = .playing
must do the trick for you if you run it in a loop somewhere in your application.
Note that this is not 100% reliable because:
If an event is generated before two subsequent playbackState state changes right after you've switched to a different application, it would still be catched by the application in the active window;
If another application is doing the same thing, there would be a constant race condition in the queue, with unpredictable outcome.
References:
Documentation for playbackState is here;
See also a similar question;
See also a bug report for mpv with a similar
issue (a pre-MPRemoteCommandCenter one, but still very valuable)
OR get an indication of when someone else has taken control of the audio
As far as I know there's no public API for this in macOS.

Non helpfull error message Calabash with page objects pattern

I'm currently using Calabash framework to automate functional testing for a native Android and IOS application. During my time studying it, I stumbled upon this example project from Xamarin that uses page objects design pattern which I find to be much better to organize the code in a Selenium fashion.
I have made a few adjustments to the original project, adding a file called page_utils.rb in the support directory of the calabash project structure. This file has this method:
def change_page(next_page)
sleep 2
puts "current page is #{current_page_name} changing to #{next_page}"
#current_page = page(next_page).await(PAGE_TRANSITION_PARAMETERS)
sleep 1
capture_screenshot
#current_page.assert_info_present
end
So in my custom steps implementation, when I want to change the page, I trigger the event that changes the page in the UI and update the reference for Calabash calling this method, in example:
#current_page.click_to_home_page
change_page(HomePage)
PAGE_TRANSITION_PARAMETERS is a hash with parameters such as timeout:
PAGE_TRANSITION_PARAMETERS = {
timeout: 10,
screenshot_on_error: true
}
Just so happens to be that whenever I have a timeout waiting for any element in any screen during a test run, I get a generic error message such as:
Timeout waiting for elements: * id:'btn_ok' (Calabash::Android::WaitHelpers::WaitError)
./features/support/utils/page_utils.rb:14:in `change_page'
./features/step_definitions/login_steps.rb:49:in `/^I enter my valid credentials$/'
features/04_support_and_settings.feature:9:in `And I enter my valid credentials'
btn_ok is the id defined for the trait of the first screen in my application, I don't understand why this keeps popping up even in steps ahead of that screen, masking the real problem.
Can anyone help getting rid of this annoyance? Makes really hard debugging test failures, specially on the test cloud.
welcome to Calabash!
As you might be aware, you'll get a Timeout waiting for elements: exception when you attempt to query/wait for an element which can't be found on the screen. When you call page.await(opts), it is actually calling wait_for_elements_exist([trait], opts), which means in your case that after 10 seconds of waiting, the view with id btn_ok can't be found on the screen.
What is assert_info_present ? Does it call wait_for_element_exists or something similar? More importantly, what method is actually being called in page_utils.rb:14 ?
And does your app actually return to the home screen when you invoke click_to_home_page ?
Unfortunately it's difficult to diagnose the issue without some more info, but I'll throw out a few suggestions:
My first guess without seeing your application or your step definitions is that #current_page.click_to_home_page is taking longer than 10 seconds to actually bring the home page back. If that's the case, simply try increasing the timeout (or remove it altogether, since the default is 30 seconds. See source).
My second guess is that the element with id btn_ok is not actually visible on screen when your app returns to the home screen. If that's the case, you could try changing the trait definition from * id:'btn_ok' to all * id:'btn_ok' (the all operator will include views that aren't actually visible on screen). Again, I have no idea what your app looks like so it's hard to say.
My third guess is it's something related to assert_info_present, but it's hard to say without seeing the step defs.
On an unrelated note, I apologize if our sample code is a bit outdated, but at the time of writing we generally don't encourage the use of #current_page to keep track of a page. Calabash was written in a more or less stateless manner and we generally encourage step definitions to avoid using state wherever possible.
Hope this helps! Best of luck.

Can't quit from AppleScript application

I have an endless loop AppleScript application started at login. But there is a problem: I can not quit it unless im using SIGKILL. Is there any way to add some quit handler to it? Or there is better approach to make background process in AppleScript then "repeat - delay - end repeat"?
It doesn't sound like you're using an on idle handler, that's what you want to do.
on run
-- prep code goes here
end run
on idle
-- your code here
display dialog "TEST" giving up after 4
return 10
end idle
The above code will repeat itself every 10 seconds (based on the return value of 10, change as needed). The only other thing to keep in mind is this script needs to be saved as "Stay Open".
Hope this helps

Run when you can

In my sinatra web application, I have a route:
get "/" do
temp = MyClass.new("hello",1)
redirect "/home"
end
Where MyClass is:
class MyClass
#instancesArray = []
def initialize(string,id)
#string = string
#id = id
#instancesArray[id] = this
end
def run(id)
puts #instancesArray[id].string
end
end
At some point I would want to run MyClass.run(1), but I wouldn't want it to execute immediately because that would slow down the servers response to some clients. I would want the server to wait to run MyClass.run(temp) until there was some time with a lighter load. How could I tell it to wait until there is an empty/light load, then run MyClass.run(temp)? Can I do that?
Addendum
Here is some sample code for what I would want to do:
$var = 0
get "/" do
$var = $var+1 # each time a request is recieved, it incriments
end
After that I would have a loop that would count requests/minute (so after a minute it would reset $var to 0, and if $var was less than some number, then it would run tasks util the load increased.
As Andrew mentioned (correctly—not sure why he was voted down), Sinatra stops processing a route when it sees a redirect, so any subsequent statements will never execute. As you stated, you don't want to put those statements before the redirect because that will block the request until they complete. You could potentially send the redirect status and header to the client without using the redirect method and then call MyClass#run. This will have the desired effect (from the client's perspective), but the server process (or thread) will block until it completes. This is undesirable because that process (or thread) will not be able to serve any new requests until it unblocks.
You could fork a new process (or spawn a new thread) to handle this background task asynchronously from the main process associated with the request. Unfortunately, this approach has the potential to get messy. You would have to code around different situations like the background task failing, or the fork/spawn failing, or the main request process not ending if it owns a running thread or other process. (Disclaimer: I don't really know enough about IPC in Ruby and Rack under different application servers to understand all of the different scenarios, but I'm confident that here there be dragons.)
The most common solution pattern for this type of problem is to push the task into some kind of work queue to be serviced later by another process. Pushing a task onto the queue is ideally a very quick operation, and won't block the main process for more than a few milliseconds. This introduces a few new challenges (where is the queue? how is the task described so that it can be facilitated at a later time without any context? how do we maintain the worker processes?) but fortunately a lot of the leg work has already been done by other people. :-)
There is the delayed_job gem, which seems to provide a nice all-in-one solution. Unfortunately, it's mostly geared towards Rails and ActiveRecord, and the efforts people have made in the past to make it work with Sinatra look to be unmaintained. The contemporary, framework-agnostic solutions are Resque and Sidekiq. It might take some effort to get up and running with either option, but it would be well worth it if you have several "run when you can" type functions in your application.
MyClass.run(temp) is never actually executing. In your current request to / path you instantiate a new instance of MyClass then it will immediately do a get request to /home. I'm not entirely sure what the question is though. If you want something to execute after the redirect, that functionality needs to exist within the /home route.
get '/home' do
# some code like MyClass.run(some_arg)
end

How do I get a _received_ iCal event to run a script?

I'm trying to write an Applescript that will make an outgoing Skype call at times scheduled by received invites from other parties.
I think I'm fine with the script to Skype's API to make the call, however I'm struggling with iCal with either method of
A) getting the script to run in the background and getting the time of all new events, or
B) getting the event alert to run a one-off script.
The issue with option B) is that although you can set events from within iCal so that the alert runs a script, I need to trigger this from events that have been received.
A typical example would be:
All scripts and iCal running on the Host
At 10am a User schedules an event (via google cal on portable device) for 3pm** and invites the the Host.
At 3pm the script on the Host uses Skype API to make a call to the User.
** this could just as equally be on a date in the future and the requirements still hold.
Many thanks for any advice!
Since iCal doesn't have any notifications (some applications do like iChat) you'll have to run a "stay open" applescript application. Something like this will do it for your "B" scenario. NOTE: you will have to add the path to your applescript file (the one that makes your Skype call) in the "applescriptPath" variable.
When launched it will get a listing of all the calendar events you have in iCal. It will then run itself every 5 minutes. When it runs it will check the current events against the list of events it originally made. If there are new events then your applescript will be added as an alarm to the new events. This way it keeps track of the current events between runs and only finds the new ones.
So this script should be a good starting point for you. Remember to save it as a stay-open applescript application. You probably will want to modify it. For example I have it checking every calendar for new events but you may have one particular calendar you want to target. Good luck.
property storedUIDs : {} -- we use this to check for new events, if an event is not in this list then it is new
global applescriptPath
on run
set applescriptPath to (path to desktop as text) & "myAlarm.scpt" -- the path to the applescript which is run as the alarm
end run
on idle
set newEvents to {}
tell application "iCal"
set theCals to calendars
set allUIDs to {}
repeat with aCal in theCals
tell aCal
set theseEvents to events
repeat with anEvent in theseEvents
set thisUID to uid of anEvent
set end of allUIDs to thisUID
if thisUID is not in storedUIDs then
set end of newEvents to contents of anEvent
end if
end repeat
end tell
end repeat
set storedUIDs to allUIDs
if (count of newEvents) is less than 5 then -- this will prevent the first run of the script from adding the alarm to every event
repeat with aNewEvent in newEvents
-- do something with this new events like add an alarm to run an applescript
set theAlarm to make new open file alarm at end of open file alarms of aNewEvent with properties {trigger interval:0, filepath:POSIX path of applescriptPath}
end repeat
end if
end tell
return (5 * 60) -- run every 5 minutes
end idle
on quit
set storedUIDs to {}
continue quit
end quit

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