AppleScript in a Nutshell

Chapter 20. Apple Data Detectors Extension

Apple Data Detectors (ADD) is a technology that Apple Computer introduced during the late 1990s. It allows a scripter to specify an AppleScript for the processing of certain types of information that users encounter in desktop windows, such as web site addresses or geographic locations. Apple Data Detectors are designed to identify these important snippets of data, including email and Newsgroup addresses, in almost any application window you might be working in. Figure 20-1 shows the Apple Data Detectors 1.02 control panel.

Figure 20-1. Apple Data Detectors control panel

For example, you might be in AppleWorks, WordPerfect, or Microsoft Word and come upon a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that you want to open up in your browser and visit. Or you find an email address of someone to whom you would like to send an instant email message. Rather than manually cut and paste the URL or email address into another application (which might not even be running at the time), ADD allows you to select the text or paragraph that contains the text and then Control-click the selection. Up pops a contextual menu in the canvas space of the window. The menu contains a list of actions that you can perform with the selected data—even if you just selected a whole paragraph surrounding the text. ADD is designed to look for and pull out evidence of the specified ...