I’m wondering how it might be possible to make an AS Studio app act as a floating palette for a specific application, in this case Illustrator. To be clear, I want the app to float above an active AI document but when the panel is accessed, the app doesn’t become frontmost and doesn’t make AI’s palettes disappear.
I found these two threads, Floating Panel Window in 10.2 and Nonactivating Floating Panel, but they are old, without any workarounds mentioned in the threads, and what links to workarounds that are there no longer work.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Mac OS 10.3.9
These are relatively recent posts over at Apple’s list that might interest you:
http://lists.apple.com/archives/applescript-studio/2004/Nov/msg00040.html
http://lists.apple.com/archives/applescript-studio/2004/Nov/msg00058.html
It looks like this will at least get you past the point of disappearing palettes. At the moment I’m just using a combination of windowshadex, uiactions, and command-clicking to simulate this behavior. Having something that behaves more like, for example, the wiretap pro controller – by default – would be ideal.
Thanks much. That helped a little. I’ve got it working like I imagine it should but the panel just doesn’t show up on launch. I have to switch from Illustrator to another app then back again before it shows up. Not cool. I can’t find anything that prevents this from showing up except that it started happening after I set it to a background app (without any Dock icon). Any other ideas? 