A workaround for scripts failing with Speakable Items

Jan 29, '04 09:20:00AM

Contributed by: simX

With newer versions of Jaguar and all versions of Panther, it always seemed to me that Speakable Items was broken with compiled scripts -- you could never save a compiled script and leave it in your Speakable Items folder and then use it to command your computer via speech. The script would just refuse to execute even though the computer recognized the command via feedback. It would force you to save the script as an app, which was kludgy since an icon would appear in your Dock every time you invoked the script. Ugh.

Well, today I found out why. It dawned on me that Apple had released a new version of Script Editor when Jaguar was still out, and they shipped it with Panther. It turns out that this app is what's causing the incompatibility -- if you save a compiled script using Script Editor 2.0 or later, your compiled scripts will fail to execute when invoked via Speakable Items.

The obvious workaround is to obtain Script Editor 1.9 or lower from installations of Jaguar, and use that to save your compiled scripts. Speakable Items will then work with those saved scripts.

I hope this saves some people some aggravation over some of the scripts in the Mac OS X Hints database (especially the talk to iTunes script), since many of them use Speakable Items, and compiled scripts would seem to randomly work with some people and not with others. I'm almost positive that this is the root of the cause.

And a note to Apple -- get Script Editor 2.0 working with Speakable Items!

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Mac OS X Hints
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