[Pythonmac-SIG] appscript equivalent of launch?

[Nicholas Riley]

On Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 11:29:45PM -0700, Robert Stephenson wrote:
> As far as I can see, appscript lacks an equivalent of Applescript's  
> launch verb, which opens an app without running it (useful for apps  
> like Textedit or Keynote that create default documents when they  
> run).  Did I miss something, or how can you open a file without the  
> default run action?

AppleScript actually does two different things when you 'launch app
"XYZ"'.  First, it opens the app in the background; second, it sends a
"launch" event (ascr/noop) to the process.  Python doesn't wrap the
pieces of Launch Services needed to pass an initial Apple Event to an
application, so appscript can't do this - though it could.

I just updated my 'launch' tool to do this.  Feel free to steal the
appropriate code.

    <http://web.sabi.net/nriley/software/launch-1.1d2.tar.gz>

Examples:

% launch -Li com.apple.TextEdit
  - launches in foreground, no window

% launch -Lbi com.apple.TextEdit
  - launches in background, no window, like AppleScript

Note - if the application is already running, the above commands still
open a window.  To truly emulate AppleScript you'd need to check if
the app is already running, and if so, don't do anything.

-- 
Nicholas Riley <njriley at uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>