Red Sweater Forums

I just found a cool hint at Mac OSX Hints that uses a 1-line script to open the Apple color picker in applications that don't use the color picker. (See http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060408050920158&lsrc=osxh)

The script is ridicuously short:

choose color

That's it.

Now, when I bring this script up in Launchbar, it works fine, but when I run it from Fastscripts, it locks things up. Just wondering why. Thanks.

Doug

Daniel Jalkut

Hi Doug - very interesting bug. I was able to reproduce the problem immediately upon trying. I don't know why but for some reason calling choose color directly from FastScripts like that causes a hang. I think it's because the color picker is trying to run the event loop, but the event loop is busy handling the applescript itself.

At any rate, I'm going to look into it more deeply as soon as possible, but as a temporary workaround, how about this script, which always addresses the frontmost application:

tell application \"System Events\"
    set frontAppName to name of (first application process whose frontmost is true)
end tell

tell application frontAppName
    choose color
end tell

Let me know how that works for you!

Daniel

NovaScotian

This script, saved as an application: choose color, works perfectly as you might guess.

DougRay

Daniel,

You're new script does work ... to a point. It opens the color picker, but it still keeps FastScripts busy (the menubar icon is still highlighted and I can't select it as long as the color picker is open). Once I close the color picker, everything is back to normal. Assuming I'm going to use the color picker immediately and then close it (which I probably am), it works fine. Thanks.

Doug

Daniel Jalkut

Aha - thanks Doug. Yeah I observe that now, too. There's definitely something funky going on, and I hope to get to the bottom of it.

Daniel

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