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DumbDialog 1.0: a simple "progress bar" dialog box for applescripters

Sunday, February 19, 2006posted by Michael Rothwell @ 3:46 PM


DumbDialog 1.0 (20kb) is a small, faceless Cocoa application that does nothing but display a panel containing a progress bar and a text field. It does not have a menu bar or dock icon. It is intended for use by AppleScript programs that need to display an Aqua-looking progress bar. It was developed and tested on Tiger (10.4). It may work on older versions of OSX, but I don't know. Email me if you have any success on 10.3.

DumbDialog has three properties of interest:
  • paneltitle (text)
  • displaytext (text)
  • panelvisible (boolean)
You probably want to "activate" it early and leave it running, sending it different text to display and showing/hiding it as needed. This will make it pop open faster than restarting it and quitting it every time you want to show it.

Example usage:
tell application "DumbDialog"
activate
set paneltitle to "This is the progress panel title"
set displaytext to "Hello, world!"
set panelvisible to true
--set panelvisible to false
--quit
end tell
You can put the panel through as many "panelvisible=true","panelvisible="false" cycles as needed before finally quitting it altogether.