Freeway Actions are, at their very simplest, simple single text files placed in (or in a sub-folder of) a particular folder. Things get slightly more complex with “bundle” Actions, which end in the file-type-extension .fwactionb (for bundle). Those are specially-constructed nested folders, named in a particular manner, and the Mac OS treats them as if they were single files, even though they contain a whole world of nested resources. (This is the same way that most Mac applications are distributed, too. The .app file-extension gets the same treatment as .fwactionb.)
What you are describing sounds a lot like a missing feature in Freeway, perhaps a next-generation version of the Edit / Actions dialog. I agree it could be very compelling. There would need to be a lot of developer outreach and tooling developed to make it a practical thing, though. In order to know which Action was the newest, and what external resources (if any) it depended on, you would need a central repository for both first- and third-party Actions – either to hold the Actions themselves, or to simply be a registry of their current version and other metadata. So who would maintain that?
One of the things that I tried to do with the ActionsForge (which I built as a personal project, not sponsored by Softpress or anything) was to provide a part of this puzzle – a central registry of all Actions and their latest versions. Authors can upload their Actions and provide a rich collection of metadata about them – usage instructions, examples, links to pay for commercial Actions, etc. There is an RSS feed for each Action and for the entire collection, too, with the latest version sorted to the top. That’s all free for Action authors and Freeway users.
We have a strong tradition of community support in the Freeway universe. Action authors write and give away applications (often complex bits of software unto themselves) that allow individuals to build things they could not otherwise; and to deliver commercial sites for their clients or themselves (hopefully for pay or other revenue) without hiring a programmer to complete them. Try to imagine your Freeway experience with only the Actions that came bundled with the application.
[PLUG type=“shameless”] ActionsForge is far from perfect, and needs a lot of work, but that work also needs to be supported financially if it’s going to be done in a reasonable time frame. I ran a Kickstarter last summer to try to raise the necessary support from the community, but it wasn’t well promoted (my fault) and it didn’t get funded. Without a swath of clear time to work on this, I can’t do the sort of foundational work that is needed to re-build this resource and give it the legs it needs to run into the future. I have an “honor roll” sign-up form here: http://actionsforge.com/next where you can chip in and commit to supporting the next fund-raiser. (Probably not on KickStarter, I’d love to hear suggestions for alternative platforms.) I hope you all agree that it’s worth supporting. If you do, we can have nice things! [/PLUG]
Walter
On Mar 23, 2013, at 1:48 PM, Thomas wrote:
Dave, i would imagine a simple double-click on the action, the installer opens an checks the environment on the individual system, are all needed libraries up to date, are there newer actions installed, are there incompatibilities between the existing actions. After that test the user could be asked: will you install or not.
Don’t know much about programming and can’t say if that’s simply possible to do for an action-designer, but it would keep the FW-action-world much more simple and reliable.
Tom
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