Using the Scripts menu in Eudora
Using the Scripts menu in EudoraWe've added new commands to Eudora's Scripts menu. Here's what the menu looks like:
And here's what each of the sub-menus is about...
The Forward To Sub-Menu
Each of the commands in this sub-menu forwards the current message to someone else, and quickly formats it to make it look sexier.
You probably don't know Bozo the Clown (and he's probably not at bozo.com) or Ignatius Reilly, and Mom & Dad are probably at aol.com, not home.com. The idea here is that you could use Frontier's menu bar editor to create a list of people you commonly forward messages to, even assign single keystrokes to them. They will clearly be able to see that it's a forwarded message (Eudora's built-in forwarder isn't quite so clear...).
If you're using Frontier Runtime, and therefore can't customize this menu, the Someone Else... option is the way to go. Even if you have Frontier, you may not have the time to tweak up this menu. I find that I'm this kind of guy, but I use the Someone Else command all the time because I like to show off.
The Respond With Sub-Menu
This one is a social experiment!
If you get a boring message and can't stand to *not* send a polite reply, choose one of the four styles of replies from this sub-menu and a script replies on your behalf.
There are four choices -- Sincere Appreciation, Lunch in 2 Weeks?, Can I Help? and Job Offer. You can edit the text of the template files by choosing the last command in this menu -- Open Templates Folder.
Note: When you open this folder it will be empty. Click on the line below to download a folder containing four files. Unstuff it and copy the files into the Response Templates folder.
The Selected Text Sub-Menu
As its name implies, the commands in this sub-menu do something to the text that's selected -- uppercasing it or lowercasing it, wrapping & indenting it, or passing it onto Netscape as a URL.
The Run Message Command
This is a very powerful little command. First it checks to see if there's a selection. If so, that's what it runs. Try it here (note -- this only works in Eudora, not in Netscape), select the line below and press cmd-/:
dialog.alert ("The time is " + clock.now ())
A dialog should have popped up, confirming that you actually want to run the script. This dialog will pop up *every* time. You can disable it if you have Frontier, just edit the script at Eudora.getCurrentScript. Be careful!
The result of the script is put on the clipboard.
It will also run a script from the In window or the Out window. Just put the cursor on the email message you want to run and press cmd-/. Same confirmation dialog, result goes on the clipboard.
I hope to use this feature to send out updates. Maybe for questionnaires. Who knows what else???
The Example Scripts Sub-Menu
There are three commands in this menu, two of which, In Box Looper and Out Box Looper are just interesting, but not really useful. Good sample code, maybe someone has some ideas for scripts that loop over a Eudora list window?
The third command illustrates a hole in the implementation of Eudora's menu sharing, which otherwise is just great! When a script terminates in an error, the client app needs to pop up a dialog. Eudora isn't doing this. This command highlights the error. When the problem is fixed a dialog should pop up saying "This is a test of Eudora's script error reporting dialog."
The Web Sites Sub-Menu
If Netscape supported menu sharing this wouldn't be there. I put together a list of websites that I like to visit. Each of the commands in this menu sends a message to Netscape (launching it if neccessary) to jump to a specific page.
The Random Cool Site command jumps you to a random cool site (of course!).
The Edit Shared Menu command
Brings Frontier to the front, and opens system.menubars.CSOm, the shared menu for Eudora. This command does nothing in Frontier Runtime.
The Edit Scripts Table command
Brings Frontier to the front, and opens system.verbs.apps.Eudora, the table of glue scripts and examples for Eudora. This command does nothing in Frontier Runtime.
First, download this file:
It's the Frontier "install file" for Eudora. It teaches Frontier how to talk to Eudora and it contains the shared menu, as documented above.
Launch Frontier or Frontier Runtime. Double-click on Eudora.Frontier.
Launch Eudora. You should now see the Scripts menu in Eudora's menu bar.
Important: the menu appears only when Frontier is running.
