Re: Proposed Mac::Pasteboard

On Jan 26, 12:45 am, dougl...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Doug McNutt) wrote:
> At 03:15 +0000 1/21/08, harryfm...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
>
> >Is there a module that will let one manipulate a Mac OS X pasteboard?
There  does not seem to be anything on CPAN that strikes me as being for
that purpose.
>
> Have a look at the tools pbcopy and pbpaste that are delivered with OS
neXt.

I don't have NeXt (however it's capitalized), but tools with the same
names ****p with Mac OS X. The OS X version is limited to one flavor of
data ('com.apple.traditional-mac-plain-text') and four pasteboards --
the system clipboard, the "find" pasteboard, the "ruler" pasteboard,
and the "font" pasteboard. The manual is at
http://developer.apple.com/do***entation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pbcopy.1.html

I did not intend to be so limited, though the only non-text test I
have done is to copy a JPEG to the system clipboard with Graphic
Converter, send it back to a file with my software (it turned out to
be a PICT on the clipboard), open the file, and look to see that I got
the same picture back.

> There is a subtle difference between pasteboard and clipboard. NeXt has
a pasteboard which sometimes refers to the current selection and not just
to something that has been "copied". That allows services to do things
like "execute selected text as a terminal command".

That's my understanding of the Mac OS X pasteboard. I do not intend to
sup****t promised data in the first release, and I may never fully
sup****t writing services (which appear to require a full-blown Mac OS
X application bundle with embedded Info.plist file) in Perl. Right now
the development plan (well, aspiration anyway) is:

1) Basic functionality
2) Promised data
3) Destination URLs
4) Hooks for translation services

Number 4 is intended to mean "If you can get the Perl code into a Mac
OS X application bundle (and I think X Code allows this, though I have
never done anything with it), I will try to supply the code to acquire
the data." I think I understand number 2, but the others are really
fuzzy to me now, and may never happen.

Tom Wyant