Don't quit Carbon apps to update Script menu entries

May 23, '03 09:45:00AM

Contributed by: jolinwarren

I was reading the Start Clutter from iTunes hint today, and noticed that there is a common misconception I've seen in iTunes and AppleScript hints on the web: The suggestion is that you should quit iTunes. Well, in fact, as with most (all?) Carbon applications that have a script menu, the menu updates dynamically.

So if iTunes is running and you add or remove a script from its scripts folder, that will be reflected in the Scripts menu the next time you select it, without having to quit and relaunch iTunes. Give it a try and see! Very useful when you're playing around with scripts or trying to tweak one.

It's always worth doing a quick check on an application to see if it dynamically updates its script menu as this can save a lot of time. I don't know how good Cocoa applications are with this, but being less "Mac-like" I suspect maybe they don't behave quite the same way.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030522014111554