Acrobat’s JavaScript is a great tool to extend the application, or to automate reoccurring tasks. There are several ways a JavaScript can be added to the application or a document (e.g. folder level scripts, validation scripts, event handling scripts, …), but regardless of how a script is written, chances are that the developer wants to test parts of the script in Acrobat’s Javascript console. This console window can be shown by either using the “Advanced>Document Processing>JavaScript Debugger…” menu item or Ctrl-J on Windows or Cmd-J on a Mac:

After the console or debugger window comes up, the user can then enter Javascript and execute it…

… that is, as long as a full keyboard with a numeric keypad is used. In Adobe’s documentation, we find the following instructions to execute Javascript typed into the console window:

The JavaScript console allows you to evaluate single or multiple lines of code. There are three ways to evaluate JavaScript code while using the interactive console:

• To evaluate a portion of a line of code, highlight the portion and press either the Enter key on the numeric keypad or press Ctrl + Enter.
• To evaluate a single line of code, make sure the cursor is positioned on that line and press either the Enter key on the numeric keypad or press Ctrl + Enter.
• To evaluate multiple lines of code, highlight those lines and press either the Enter key on the numeric keypad or press Ctrl + Enter.

That works fine as long as you have access to the numeric keypad, but on a MacBook or a MacBook Pro without that keypad. No key combination involving fn, ctrl, cmd or option with the Return or Enter key will result in the Javascript getting executed.

The virtual keyboard to the rescue: Mac OS comes with a handy keyboard viewer that allows us to send the correct key code to the application. To bring up the keyboard viewer, bring up the Mac OS System Preferences first and select the “Keyboard” category:

Make sure that the option “Show Keyboard & Character Viewer in menu bar” is selected. Once this is done, you can access the keyboard viewer from the menu bar:

Now comes the tricky part: Write some Javascript in the console window and place the cursor on the line you want to execute or select the snippet of the Javascript that should be executed. In the following example I’m using code from Adobe’s Javascript API documentation:

  var menuItems = app.listMenuItems()
  for( var i in menuItems)
    console.println(menuItems[i] + "\n")

With the console prepped, bring up the keyboard viewer and start pushing keys – real keys that is: Hold down the “fn” and the “control” key, then move the mouse pointer to the “Enter” key on the keyboard viewer and click it…

… and voila, the script gets executed:

This is not the most straight forward method, but at least it’s possible to use the Javascript console to execute code when using a MacBook.

It’s been a while… My last post was a long time ago. I my defense, I’ve been working on a project, and that took up a lot of time. Now that that’s done, I may just post to my blog every now and then…

Let’s start with something simple… Cats and laptops. Here are a few pictures of my cat that I’ve taken over the last few months.

The last picture is the prelude to the next picture – a while after I took the previous picture I needed my laptop again. Here is what I found on the screen:

Amazon.com sent me an email yesterday, informing me that Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is available for pre-order. Because I have more than one Mac, I’m of course interested in the family pack for up to five computers. When I visited the page on Amazon, I was surprised to see what customers bought after visiting that page:

That looks very suspicious… My first thought was that Microsoft might be behind that, doing some “optimization” behind Amazon’s back. Just to be sure that it was not just a fluke, I visited the site again today, and the numbers are still the same.

I finally got a chance to test the GarageBand 4.1.2 update that was released last week in regards to the bug I discovered back when the Magic GarageBand feature was first released.

Just to recap: When the Magic feature was used with the Music/GarageBand directory on a different physical disk than the /Library folder, I ended up with a bunch of cryptic error messages and an empty project.

The problem is finally fixed: I was able to create a Magic GarageBand project on my liked Music directory. I guess Apple is telling me to pick up my guitar again…

… but still no fix for my problem.

See my original writeup for some background information.

I finally got an email response from an AppleCare Product Specialist. Unfortunately, the response was not very helpful: It looks like they are now ignoring my original problem and are spending too much time on my question about a workaround. They still have not acknowledged that this is a bug in GarageBand.

After I figured out what causes the problem (linking the GarageBand folder to a different hard disk), I asked if there was a mechanism to configure GarageBand with a different default folder. They told me that this is not possible and “So there is no fix for this and it is normal behavior.”

I have a hard time to accept that this is “normal behavior” – storing your data on a non-startup disk is something I’ve done for years (decades?) and even though it may not be a standard configuration, if every other feature of GarageBand works with my environment, Magic GarageBand should work as well.

Let’s just assume that this is another case of a “Product Specialist” filtering out too much information when relaying this information to an engineer.

I know that the new iLife ’08 GarageBand Magic feature is not a substitute for Band in a Box (or the Windows version), but it would be an easy way to make my (rare) guitar practice sessions more interesting. So, imagine my surprise when I just ended up with a bunch of error messages like this one ‘Audio file “Original Bass#3.caf” not found.’, with the option to skip or to search (which of course does not find anything) …

… and a few minutes of silence in the resulting projects:

So, it looked like a major new feature of GarageBand was not working, therefore it should be fairly easy to find out why and what to do about it by googling for this problem… Wrong, it turns out that almost nobody is having this problem. I found one thread on Apple’s support site with a workaround, but I hate to copy files without understanding why and what the impact would be. I have Apple Care protection for my Mac Pro, so let’s give Apple a call… After 79 minutes on the phone with them, I figured out what’s causing this problem, and then I tried to convince them that it’s indeed a genuine bug in the software. While talking to them, I tried a few things on my system, and slowly developed a theory, and verified it:

My system is setup with the original startup disk that stores all applications, but I added three more disks, which I’m running in a RAID configuration to store all data files. To make this work, I am using links in my home directory to link directories like Movies, Music or Pictures to their actual storage location on the second disk. This works with all applications that make use of these files (e.g. Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie – the old one, haven’t tried the new version yet – or iDisk). GarageBand also works, as long as I’m not using the new Magic feature.

Magic GarageBand saves the new project to it’s default location, which is the user’s Music/GarageBand directory. The user has no control over that. While it’s saving the project, it needs to access the .caf files, which contain the instrument tracks. These files are stored in the individual directories in /Library/Application Support/Garage/Band/Magic GarageBand. It looks like it can only find these files if the Music/GarageBand directory is on the same disk as the /Library directory (meaning, the startup disk).

A Unix link (or to be more accurate, a soft link in this case) should be should be transparent to an application. The operating system takes care of opening the files, regardless of how they are referenced. GarageBand seems to be different – it looks like it is using the storage location to generate the path to it’s configuration and data files (potentially by creating a relative path starting from the project directory). I tried to capture what GarageBand does in ktrace, but I was not able to extract anything useful (that’s mainly because this was the first time I ever used ktrace). Both people from Apple support that I talked to had no idea what a Unix link was.

Because all other features of GarageBand work with my setup, I’m labeling this behavior as a bug. So far I don’t have a workaround besides putting my Music directory back on my startup disk, and linking some of the subdirectories (e.g. Pictures and Movies) to my RAID system.

Let’s see if Apple can come up with something (or a fix in the next release).