RejectConf RubyOSA hack

Ruby
1

I remember vaguely from RejectConf someone hacked up something to
position windows on OS X using Ruby OSA.

Did this ever get released? Or at least, is that code available
somewhere?

If anyone remembers this and has some info, I’d be much obliged.

I’ve been doing a lot of hacking on OS X lately rather than GNU/Linux,
and the window manager is nice but it ain’t no DWM.

Something like the hack from RejectConf might help that some :slight_smile:

2

On Jan 22, 2007, at 3:32 PM, Gregory B. wrote:

Something like the hack from RejectConf might help that some :slight_smile:

Greg-

That was Sebastian D. who wrote that hack. I had a copy of it
somewhere but I cannot find it right now. I do knwo sebastians blog
though:

http://www.notsostupid.com/

Maybe you can find him armed with that info :wink:

Cheers-
– Ezra Z.
– Lead Rails Evangelist
– [email protected]
– Engine Y., Serious Rails Hosting
– (866) 518-YARD (9273)

3

On 1/22/07, Ezra Z. [email protected] wrote:

    That was Sebastian D. who wrote that hack. I had a copy of it

somewhere but I cannot find it right now. I do knwo sebastians blog
though:

Oh, i’ll just hunt him down at a NYC.rb meeting or something. Thanks!

4

On 1/22/07, Ezra Z. [email protected] wrote:

Oh, i’ll just hunt him down at a NYC.rb meeting or something. Thanks!

5

On 1/23/07, has [email protected] wrote:

Gregory B. wrote:

I remember vaguely from RejectConf someone hacked up something to
position windows on OS X using Ruby OSA.

Did this ever get released? Or at least, is that code available somewhere?

Dunno about RubyOSA, but here’s the ‘Stagger Finder Windows’ example
from rb-appscript which might give you some ideas:

Thanks for the snippet and the advice. Not sure when I’ll get a
chance to play with all of this, but this post will sure help.

6

Gregory B. wrote:

I remember vaguely from RejectConf someone hacked up something to
position windows on OS X using Ruby OSA.

Did this ever get released? Or at least, is that code available somewhere?

Dunno about RubyOSA, but here’s the ‘Stagger Finder Windows’ example
from rb-appscript which might give you some ideas:

#######

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

Rearranges Finder windows diagonally across screen with title bars

one above another. (Could easily be adapted to work with any

scriptable application that uses standard window class terminology.)

require “appscript”
include Appscript

x, y = 0, 44
offset = 22

Get list of window references, ignoring any minimised windows

window_list = app(‘Finder’).windows[its.collapsed.not].get

Move windows while preserving their original sizes

window_list.reverse.each do |window|
x1, y1, x2, y2 = window.bounds.get
window.bounds.set([x, y, x2 - x1 + x, y2 - y1 + y])
x += offset
y += offset
end

#######

A couple of tips:

  • If writing general-purpose a script to work with multiple apps, note
    that the terminology tends to vary a bit: Carbon scriptable apps often
    use ‘collapsed’ while Cocoa ones use ‘minimized’. You could probably
    just try ‘minimized’ first, then try ‘collapsed’ if an ‘unknown
    property’ error occurs. If both fail, the app is probably
    non-scriptable, in which case it’ll either have to be ignored, or
    controlled via System Events’ GUI Scripting facilities.

  • If you’re writing a script to adjust multiple applications’ windows
    at once, some apps (e.g. Photoshop, InDesign, XCode) can have pretty
    huge terminologies, so there may a perceptible delay while appscript
    parses all of these these. Should you find the script lacks teh snappy
    because of this, you could avoid the overhead by using the lower-level
    AEM module, which uses raw Apple event codes, instead of the
    terminology-driven Appscript module.

HTH

has

7

Has anyone successfully created an Exchange mailbox using Ruby? I am
stuck at a dead-end trying to do so.

Thanks,

Charles

8

On 1/23/07, Charles L. [email protected] wrote:

Has anyone successfully created an Exchange mailbox using Ruby? I am
stuck at a dead-end trying to do so.

Thanks,

Charles

It looks like you could use the CDOEXM in Microsoft Exchange System
Manager
Tools. I googled this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327079, which is
in
VB, but could easily be translated to use WIN32OLE in Ruby.

Another thing, slightly offtopic and not directly pertaining to this
question, there seem to be many questions on this list about
WIN32OLE/WIN32API that aren’t necessarily Ruby specific and would be
essentially the same in Perl/Python/C#/VB/et, al. I don’t mind posts
like
this at all, but they might appear as noise to those who aren’t
interested.
Does anyone know of any programming language agnostic mailing lists for
Windows OLE programming? Just a thought.

Nate