Steven Bristol noted that the posted version of my “Change IM Status” script doesn’t work in Leopard. That may be as I’ve tweaked the heck out of it over the past several months but never posted the updates.

Hell, this is the first that I’ve heard of anyone else using the little beast. Cool!

What I really want to do with my IM/messaging apps is selectively block contacts programatically. This would let me build an “I’m Working” state where I could block out the world except for my immediate colleagues, for instance. Being somewhat ADD-ish (show me a developer who isn’t!) and a nearly-compulsive checker of incoming e-mail/IMs, this would be huge for me. I’m DYING for this.

Sadly, neither app seems to provide that level of event to OSA such that I could “veto” an incoming chat. I’m probably SoL regarding Skype but perhaps not so with Adium. I taught myself Objective-C for shits and giggles a few months ago after a chat with uber-hacker Marcel Molina. Maybe the Adium folks would be amenable to a new feature?

I’d still prefer for an event-based architecture where I could register my app for OSA events from Skype/Adium and use them to effect Skype/Adium.

Hrm. I wonder if iChat provides a more robust OSA model? Worth a looksy.

P.S. I’m ticked that the “Current Application” -> “Show Menu Items” feature of Quicksilver seems to be broken in Leopard. I loved this feature for blog posting from TextMate…

This evening’s NoVaRUG was a good time. Rodney Degracia spoke first about RubyCLR, which provides a dynamically generated bridge between a Ruby VM and the RubyCLR. If I ever need to get at .NET internals again, now I know how I’m going to do it. In fact, I dropped an e-mail to a colleague in the office about it — except that his assembly is executed from Python. A quick Google turned up “Python for .NET” as an option.

Then it was my turn to talk to RubyOSA and RB-AppScript.  Admittedly, after using both, I'm strongly biased toward RubyOSA.  I have the distinct feeling that, after my presentation, the audience felt the same way.

Well, the Mac users in the audience.

Out of twenty or so people in the room, it turned out that I was really presenting to perhaps five or six Mac users.  I suppose that RailsConf is in no way representative of your average Right Coast Ruby developer.  However, oddly, nearly everyone stayed for my presentation.  I even fielded several good questions.  All in all, I had a blast.

When Xandy asked for topics for next time, I asked if someone would present on RSpec.  His next words were, "Thanks for volunteering, Evan."

Time to learn RSpec...

Slides available here: OS X Scripting with Ruby

While holding the Ruby Hoedown BoF about RubyOSA and AppScript, I mentioned how I’ve never gotten a return value out of RubyOSA — which is why I used AppScript when I needed a return value.

Shoot me now.

A quick google of “rubyosa applescript return value” yielded this post to ruby-talk-google. Woops…

It’s this simple:

require 'rubygems'
require 'rbosa'
skype = OSA.app('Skype')
OSA.wait_reply = true
call = skype.send2 "call echo123"

And call is non-nil.

Admittedly, I’m somewhat at a loss as to why wait_reply is defaulted to nil…

Update 8/11/04 1609: Laurent tells me that, if the Applescript definition is correct, RubyOSA should correctly provide return values. Chalk that up as yet another bug in the Skype Applescript API. I’ll report it soon (it’s going into iGTD now…).

– Thanks, Laurent!