Quick heads-up, while I still work on the “official” public beta launch newsletter:
After a lot of overhauling and building of new infrastructure, the public beta of Browser Actions has (stealthily) started – you can find the download over at the website!
Since Apple made it clear that using the Accessibility API for anything but accessibility is both valid and not officially sanctioned, I’ve decided to distribute BA outside the App Store. So here we are, sorry it took me so long.
Anyways, I’ve added a ton of documentation, and put up some examples on this very forum (I’ll need to crank out more, and document some of my own workflows). And I’ll scour your previous input (for the TestFlight) version for feature ideas and todos.
So if you could download it and kick the tires, I’d be grateful. If you have suggestions re examples or docs, please let me know.
It’s great to hear that you’ll be returning with “Browser Actions”! I still need to dive deeper into the tool again. I started with Safari and can’t read or set format fields, which works fine in Chrome:
Working with menu items doesn’t seem to work in either browser:
Moin, thanks for the report. Did you go through the setup again? Different app, different bundle ID than before, so the permissions from the previous TestFlight-based app don’t carry over…
Hi,
yes did the setup again, but did switch the activate button on for “Browser Action” in the accessibility window, my fault .
But the form field stuff still not works in Safari. Also with the dust installed new version 2024.0.2.
Fine! I rebuild some of my other old examples, which are mainly reading stuff like the URL, or the content of a browser like the HTML or the text. These shortcut are wiring on all tested browser: Chrome, Vivaldi and on Safari as well!
The Browser Tab object gained an additional property, “Current Selection (Markdown)”, which returns whatever’s currently selected in the target tab as Markdown. (The result will not contain media, like images, videos, audio – sorry.) The old property “Current Selection” was replaced by “Current Selection (Plain Text)” (which fulfils the same task). It wasn’t just a surface level change, so you’ll have to adjust your workflows, should they presently use the old “Current Selection” property.
The Markdown implementation might be a bit brittle, please let me know if you run into issues.
No longer broken
Fixes several Safari issues with BA reporting “Malformed script” errors, ahem.
Makes error messages less cryptic and more readable.
The app should update itself in the next 24h or so, but if you don’t want to wait, there’s a “Check for updates” main menu item!
I fully rewrote the Markdown conversion that provides the data for the Browser Tab’s “Current Selection (Markdown)” property. It now handles images, tables, nested lists, and pretty much everything else like a champ.
Sorry for the extremely half-baked previous implementation.
.