V

Border Crossings

One of the most important aspects of Frontier is its ability to reach out beyond itself into the wider world of your computer. It can get information from the system, and it can manipulate files in many powerful ways. What's more, it can make other programs do its bidding, and respond to other programs when they ask Frontier to do their bidding.

These are the powers of Frontier that make it a command center for your computer as a whole, and around which Frontier was originally designed. Thanks to them, UserTalk scripts can bring to bear the specialized abilities of other programs, building systems where programs perform automated tasks, operate in concert, and exchange data.

This section is exclusively about UserTalk verbs, but even readers less concerned with UserTalk may wish at least to skim these chapters for what they reveal about the sorts of thing that Frontier is capable of doing.

This section also talks about how to run AppleScript scripts inside Frontier, how to extend UserTalk with OSAX code fragments, and how to edit Frontier objects, such as wptexts, with other applications.

• Chapter 31, Driving the System
• Chapter 32, Driving Other Applications
• Chapter 33, AppleScript
• Chapter 34, Driving Frontier from Outside
• Chapter 35, External Editors