[Sage]

Hi all... I'm not sure if this is the right forum to be posting this in, but anyway... I have the following script written up (a combination of scripts that I pulled from MacOSXHints - I don't actually know Applescript):

Code:
tell application "Internet Connect"
	set configName to "Internal Modem"
	set currentStatus to status of configuration configName
	if state of currentStatus is 0 then
		connect configuration "Internal Modem"
		tell application "iTunes"
			activate
		end tell
		tell application "Mail"
			activate
		end tell
		set the URL_list to {"http://us.imdb.com/StudioBrief/", "http://news.google.com/"}
		tell application "Safari"
			repeat with i from 1 to number of items in URL_list
				set this_URL to item i of URL_list
				open location this_URL
			end repeat
		end tell
	else
		if state of currentStatus is 4 then disconnect configuration configName
	end if
	quit
end tell

However, there's one drawback - When it gets to the part of launching the links in Safari, the Internet Connect app usually hasn't finished connecting yet, so I get a "Can't Connect to Server" error. The only thing I can think of is to tell some application that takes an obscenely long time to open (like Fireworks MX) to activate and quit before Safari gets activated, but that seems like too much of a hackish-workaround. Is there any way to tell Safari to not activate until Internet Connect has finished?

Thanks,
-Sage

[Chuckit]

Try putting this in before you tell Safari to open the bookmarks:

Code:
repeat while state of status of configuration configName is not 8
delay 1
end repeat

That tells it to wait until the modem reports that it is connected.

[Sage]

That's perfect... Thank you so much!

[Rickster]

A general tip about the delay statement in AppleScript: it eats CPU like heck. (Instead of being implemented to, say, call sleep() or otherwise yield CPU for a fixed amount of time, it apparently sits in a loop or something.) If you're writing a script that's going to sit in the background waiting for something, this may be an issue.

You can work around this by saving your script as a "say open" application and putting your status checking in an on idle handler. The value you return from this handler is an integer number of seconds until the handler will be called again -- you can use this to moderate your polling.