What is FaceSpan 3?

The Mac's ease of use has always had an invisible price: creating software with a good user interface is complicated. Although AppleScript's relative simplicity brought programming within reach of ordinary users, the program's built-in features can't create more than rudimentary user interfaces. Digital Technologies' FaceSpan 3.0.1 solves this problem, providing all die tools necessary to quickly and easily create rich user interfaces for software written in AppleScript.

AppleScript has often been maligned because it's so slow, hut its ability to integrate disparate programs makes it uniquely suited to automating tedious, complex processes, such as retrieving data from one application and inserting it into another With Mac OS 8.5, Apple is slated to make AppleScript Power Mac-native, giving it — and tools such as FaceSpan — a big boost.

FaceSpan isn't aimed at professional developers, though an understanding of programming basics helps. A minimalist tutorial explains FaceSpan's basic user-interface elements and how to tie them together. Strangely enough, the tutorial's sample scripts use the far-from-ubiquitous QuarkXPress as their target application.

FaceSpan uses the project metaphor common to development environments; a project contains all the information needed to produce the final software. A new project contains a basic collection of menus and a default AppleScript. You add interface elements, such as buttons and scroll bars, by dragging them from the tools palette into the project window, which displays a list of your project's elements. FaceSpan 3.0 supports the Mac OS Appearance Manager and its user-interface elements.

Once the visual layout complete, you can attach scripts to individual interface elements. FaceSpanV built-in script editor lets you edit AppleScripts, which can control your FaceSpan application or any other AppleScript-able application.

FaceSpan's two main drawbacks aren't really its fault. AppleScript is inherently object oriented, so a project's scripts — most of which are attached to individual user-interface elements — are distributed throughout the project. Without an overview feature, complex projects quickly become unmanageable. Additionally, FaceSpan’s breadth of features seems overwhelming at first, but the program ultimately proves quite easy to use.

Somogyi, Stephan. (November 1998). FaceSpan 3.0.1. Macworld. (pg. 60).

Download FaceSpan 3 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver