One of the most common questions developers of AIR applications ask me about is whether it is possible to integrate registration and authentication for commercial versions of their applications. The answer is, yes you can thanks to the legendary Kelvin Luck who has created a service and library for Flex Builder called ShareAIR. ShareAIR is the same service I use for the In The Mod applications and I can not say enough good things about it. It’s open for beta… and here’s more info on it:
“ShareAIR is a system to allow developers to monitize their Adobe AIR applications.
It provides a way of generating license keys and locking your AIR application so it can’t be used without a valid license key. Developers can optionally provide a trial period for their application when it can be used unrestricted. All of this is available for a small per license fee. So you only pay anything if you are being paid by your users.
ShareAIR is currently under active development. If you would like to know more, to be involved with beta testing or just to be informed when ShareAIR sign up for the registration here.” - Kelvin Luck
There are some recurring questions that I get in relation to ExtendScript Toolkit and SwitchBoard so I thought it might be beneficial to create an informal FAQ. You can download my first attempt at it here.
I previously mentioned my collaboration with Andy McDonald and JR Campbell from the Centre of Advanced Textiles (CAT) at Glasgow School of Art, which ‘has been established to provide cutting-edge fabrice printing facilities and expertise to a wide range of design-based clients. Equipped with the latest digital printing technology, CAT is committed to meeting the diverse needs of design companies and manufacturers of any size, regardless of industry sector.’
As our first collaborative step away from the mass-merchandised, homogenized world of design, we have integrated the processes of generative art with textile design to create the Blowing on a Dandelion kimono. The long-term objective is to create a platform that will give you the opportunity to construct highly interactive and collaborative experiences that enable users to design, customize and remix their own unique textile products.
The images below show early stages of the design and printing of the kimono. The kimono has since been cut and assembled and is in route to San Francisco – where I will be unveiling it at my FITC goes to Max session on Wednesday the 19th at 2:30.
After the artwork is generated from a series of color and aesthetic algorithms, it is automatically dispersed across the pattern – and across the seams – so the end result is a design that simply flows elegantly around the kimono.
Hot off the textile printer! Andy choose to go with a super shiny Silk Viscose Satin material so the colors would be really vibrant. It looks great here – I can’t wait to see it in person!
For an upcoming series of tutorials commissioned by Adobe, I have integrated the incredible WiiFlash (on my Mac with WiiFlashServerJ – thanks to Alan Ross – which is now included with the WiiFlash download) + Papervision3d with a Flash Panel that runs within Photoshop CS4 Extended.
When I rotate my wrist, the roll of the 3d object within the Flash Panel updates and when I click on the A button, the 3d object in a PS 3d layer updates it’s roll position to match it. The same 3d collada file is used in both PV3d and PS.
There’s a lot of potential here. Stay tuned to my blog for an announcement on the tutorials. In the meantime, you can jump into developing your own Flash Plug-ins for Photoshop and Illustrator using the new CSXS SWC library for Flex Builder. More info here. For more info on driving Creative Suite applications from your own AIR applications, check out Adobe’s SwitchBoard here.
— Universidad Iberoamerica in Mexico
I would like to thank the Universidad Iberoamerica in Mexico, Vinny (aka Kultnation), Josue Ibañez and everyone who attended my lecture today.
Automation + Expanding our Creative Capabilities
In 1994 I remember the first time I came across the need to automate my creative workflow. I was freelancing as a visual effects artist working on a commercial and we needed to do some complicated compositing that required creating traveling mattes and manually de- and re-interlacing the footage in order to get clean mattes. I was able to streamline the process using QuicKeys to record and then playback redundant tasks and after that I was hooked on the concept. At the time, I wanted to push it further and actually get under the hood of the plug-ins in order to customize them and make them my own, so to speak. However, at the time, if I wanted to develop plug-ins, I would have had to go back to school. I was making a decent living creating visual effects for broadcast and video games so it remained just that, a dream.
14 years later, we now have 6.5 development tools to help ActionScript developers make the transition to creating our own applications as well as Flash plug-ins that drive the Adobe Creative Suite applications. By using a mixture of Flex Builder, SwitchBoard, PatchPanel, CSXS, AIR and ExtendScript ToolKit – as well as Flash in conjunction with the last 3 options – my dream has come true. Adobe plans to release an article I am working on that will make sense of what tools to use when you are trying to extend the Creative Suite, but for now, I would like to introduce you to two of the main players behind several of these technologies and explore how the technology came to be. It’s the type of story that I find as interesting as the technology they created, due to all of the events that had to fall into place before we ended up here. I am sincerely grateful for their time and willingness to participate.
An interview with Michael Daumling At the Adobe development summit in the spring I had the privilege of meeting Michael Daumling, a Principal Scientist in the ETG Core Technology group, who is the creator of ExtendScript and the main driving force behind ExtendScript ToolKit and most things related to extending the Creative Suite. Over the course of several beers, he was kind enough to tell me his great story. Unfortunately for me, I rarely drink so there were a couple of holes in my memory about his story, [blush] but he helped fill in the blanks below.
Dr. Woohoo: In the pdfAdobe Intro to Scripting, it defines ExtendScript (ES):
Adobe has developed an extended version of JavaScript, called ExtendScript, that allows you to take advantage of certain Adobe tools and scripting features.
I imagine this description simplifies major shifts in development plans, individual and team responsibilities and some risk involved as well. Can you tell us a little about how ES came to life?
Michael Daumling: ExtendScript goes way back, to the old days where small start-ups like GoLive GmbH in Germany could make some money with a product called Cyberstudio. Back then (late 90s) I was a contractor for this company. Their product (which was later known as Adobe GoLive) needed an SDK, and I had a toy JavaScript interpreter which I had written in my spare time. I have always liked interpreted languages; among the ones I wrote was StarBASIC, which back then was the scripting language (and infrastructure) of Star Division’s StarOffice, which later became OpenOffice. Or a nice app that ran a somewhat obscure language called Logo, but which was (and still is) quite popular among students as an educational language.
To make a long story short: my JavaScript engine became the beating heart of GoLive’s SDK. This came to the attention of the After Effects team. They thought that it would be cool if people could attach JavaScripts to their frames so they could move and change objects between keyframes; a concept that seemingly many people found attractive. Soon after that, a bunch of cool kids in Burlington, MA was tasked with the creation of a Flash authoring tool, so they sat down and created something called LiveMotion (another Adobe product long gone). They needed an ActionScript engine; they approached me, so I sat down and added many ActionScript specific goodies to my engine (back in these days, ActionScript was a sort of slightly crippled JavaScript, not this big beast with classes and more).
So, all of a sudden, I found myself having two additional clients. Which made Adobe move me over to the Core Technology division, and they let me hire two people, so I became an own team. I had to leave GoLive, and was now reporting to someone in San Jose.
Who was next? Do you remember Atmosphere? That was a product intended to create virtual worlds, mostly for chatting, where people could create cool avatars of themselves and roam virtual landscapes. For a lot of reasons, this concept never took off, but there was a great game and physics engine that was entirely ExtendScript driven. The product survived, and became Acrobat 3D.
At that time, Photoshop and Illustrator had scripting interfaces for Applescript and VBScript. The CoreTech team that wrote this scripting code thought that it would be a cool idea to add JavaScript to the code, and after a while, ExtendScript became part of Photoshop and Illustrator. This made me seemingly more important; Adobe made an offer to move me over to San Jose from Hamburg, Germany, which I found impossible to refuse.
The only remaining big applications that did not support ExtendScript were Acrobat and InDesign. Acrobat lived quite well with its JavaScript engine, which they had borrowed from the Mozilla Foundation, and they were quite unwilling to change their engine. At InDesign, program management was not convinced initially. InDesign was designed from the ground up with emphasis on extensibility, including the scripting languages VBScript and Applescript. Unfortunately, these languages are platform dependent, so I thought that ExtendScript would be an ideal fit as a cross-platform scripting language. InDesign’s extensibility architecture made it easy to add ExtendScript; as a matter of fact, it took InDesign’s then-scripting guru Peter Boctor and me just a week to get it up and running.
Then someone had the grand idea to combine Adobe products into a suite. Creative Suite was the name. However, how could Adobe show that these products were integrated at all? Well, guess what the glue was: ExtendScript. Adobe created the Bridge application, which originally was a file explorer built into Photoshop. As an own product, it was Adobe’s first C+++/ExtendScript hybrid. It contained gazillions of lines of ExtendScript code.
A stand-alone explorer is nice, but useless unless you can have other applications talk to it, or send back some results. We needed an interapplication communications mechanism. It should be platform independent, so COM or Applescript was not a good idea. Bridge’s Rob Corell and I sat down and invented this mechanism, which allows applications to send ExtendScript code to each other. This technology quickly became the backbone of the Creative Suite integration. I guess that without ExtendScript, the Creative Suite would not exist as it does today.
In the meantime, ExtendScript has spread to other locations and applications. Some use it internally only, to drive their APIs and modules for testing purposes, while others expose their objects to 3rd party scripters.
An interview with Bernd Paradies
In the fall of last year, thanks to the capabilities of ExtendScript and ExtendScript ToolKit, I was able to create a Flash Plug-in for Illustrator that mashed up Flickr with the Color Analytic work I had created for In The Mod in order to quickly extract colors from images and save them directly to the Swatches Panel. You can see it in action here. It was definitely a hack, but the proof-of-concept worked. Then it happened.
Apple launched Leopard, the new Max OS, in the winter of 2007 and redefined how the redraw in windows worked – similar to the one the Flash Plug-in used. This effectively killed the hacked approach I was using and so I shelved the concept of Flash plug-ins and moved on. Around January, John Nack, the Principal Product Manager, invited me to play in Adobe’s sandbox and suggested that I take a look at the work that Bernd Paradies, a Senior Computer Scientist with the ETG Core Technology group at Adobe, was working on. What I saw was beautiful! It was a dream come true.
Here was this small team within Adobe creating two SWC libraries for Flex Builder – SwitchBoard and PatchPanel (in beta) – that could be used to extend the Creative Suite applications (with the Leopard issue resolved). I mean, imagine it. If you take the number of 3rd party plug-in developers that currently exist for Adobe products and add to that the legions of ActionScript developers who can now create their own AIR applications and Flash plug-ins that drive the Creative Suite applications, the potential is mind blowing. When the smoke settles, it should be very interesting to see the new creative tools that are developed. It might take some time, but the designers will inevitably benefit in the end.
Dr. Woohoo: How did you end up at Adobe and on the ETG Core Technology group working with Michael?
Bernd Paradies: Michael and I met the first time at StarDivision in Hamburg, Germany, which was eventually bought by Sun in order to annoy Microsoft by giving away OpenOffice for free. I was responsible for the text composition engine of StarWriter (some of my old code might still be in use in the OpenOffice version). Michael was all over the place at StarDivision. A lot of his code including Easter eggs have survived in his StarCalc component of OpenOffice – you should ask him about the Easter eggs!
Either way, I left StarDivision for P.INK, which developed software for magazines and newspapers. My job was exploring new technologies including a new version of PageMaker from Adobe. The code name of Adobe’s future generation layout program was “Shuksan”, which eventually became InDesign etc. Well, P.INK went out of business and I got an offer from Adobe (I guess because of my deep Shuksan knowledge), which I happily accepted. I had to move to Seattle and brush up my English, though.
After the collapse of P.INK the CEO picked the best developers of P.INK and founded a new company called GoLive. Yes, that’s the GoLive that got acquired by Adobe a few years later and that’s how a lot of my old P.INK buddies became new colleagues again. Michael left StarDivision for GoLive and got merged into Adobe. While Michael was developing the scripting infrastructure for Adobe over the following years I stayed with the InDesign team for almost 9 years. Of course Michael and I stayed in touch over all those years and when the scripting team had an open position he encouraged me to throw my hat into the round. The rest is history: I took over BridgeTalk, Adobe bought Macromedia, and then came SwitchBoard and PatchPanel, which try to bring Adobe and Macromedia technologies closer together.
In general I love working for Adobe and personally I prefer working at CoreTech instead of a product team like InDesign. In CoreTech I get more in contact with other departments and technologies inside and outside of Adobe. Working with Michael? He is just brilliant. He is enormously productive and I often find myself in a position where he delivers long before I find time to pick up his latest work.
Dr. Woohoo: Where did the idea come from in regards to building SB & PP and how did SB & PP come to life?
Bernd Paradies: Michael and I had been working on prototype for integrating ActionScript and ExtendScript that we eventually had to abandon. After that Michael sent me off to explore another idea: Why not using the FlashPlayer as a black box and ExternalInterface as the transport mechanism (“plumbing” as we called it)? We already got the DOM information through the CS Scripting Dictionaries and he suggested that I could generate ActionScript wrapper files from OMV XML files. That’s how PatchPanel started. BTW, we didn’t have a good name until Ben Bauermeister suggested “PatchPanel” to show that this technology is a companion to SwitchBoard.
Finding a name for SwitchBoard was the smallest problem. Michael came up with it shortly I presented the idea of “BridgeTalk on AIR”. Everybody loved the idea – even my bosses. But they also were concerned about my workload and suggested that I should either work on PatchPanel or SwitchBoard. Well, I did both. The importance for having SwitchBoard was pretty clear to Michael and me very early on. We wanted to support the AIR platform and knew that AIR developers wanted to talk to CS apps. I met with the AIR team and it became pretty clear that the AIR runtime (that gets installed with every AIR app) was taboo. That’s why I had to come up with a solution that involved services.
I love my black leather Chucks and I dig what Yohji Yamamoto is doing with the Y-3 collection for Adidas… but I really want to have a pair that has some of my artwork and designs on them. So I’ve adapted some of the design applications I created to start generating the artwork for shoes. Here are a couple of the early concepts.
Flash on the Beach jumps shores and will land in Miami on April 6-8th, 2009! If you have attended FOTB in the past, you’ll know this is more than a Flash conference – it’s a celebration where art + technology + beyond collide. John Davey, one of the most sincere and sweet guys you’ll ever meet, orchestrates this conference – bringing together a group of inspiring and informative artists, designers and developers.
For my part, my theme for 2009 will focus on Art + Code + Apparel and what happens when these worlds collide. Here’s an early description of my show-n-tell session:
Art + Code + Apparel
This session, as told through Dr. Woohoo’s recent artwork and experiments, is as much about the latest color and painting applications Woohoo builds (using Flex Builder, Adobe AIR, SwitchBoard, PatchPanel & CSXS, in conjunction with Illustrator, Photoshop & Maya) in order to create the next version of generative art and design for textiles, as it is about his collaboration with the incredible Andy McDonald from the Centre for Advanced Textiles (CAT) at the Glasgow School of Art. In a dramatic shift away from the current mass-merchandise, one-design fits all world; they are plotting a (re)evolution of the textiles & apparel industry - a return to the Service Oriented Architecture of traditional craft production. Using the tools / skills that designers & developers already possess, the platform they are creating will give you the opportunity to construct highly interactive and collaborative experiences that enable users to design, customize and remix their own unique textile products. In challenging the status quo, their vision of a radically de-centralized model flips the economics of mass-production on its head (whilst significantly reducing the environmental impact). It’s an ambitious concept… will it succeed or will it fail? Either way, it’s going to be a fun ride!!! Come along and find out what they are planning.
< head > conference. I’m honored to be presenting at the < head > (online) conference on October 26, this Sunday, at 12pm (MST)/6pm (UTC). There is an incredible line up of presenters and there will be hubs where selected speakers will be presenting from. Attendance requires simply the registration fee and an internet connection. My session will focus on the following:
Generating Artwork: After helping Adobe kick the tires on and also develop multiple tools related to driving Adobe apps from AIR applications and Flash Panels, Dr. Woohoo has an inside view of how to combine these worlds in order to create tools, designs and animations that would otherwise be insane to attempt without them. Woohoo will demonstrate how he’s generating his artwork using two new Adobe tools that simplify the process of driving Illustrator, Photoshop (and maybe After Effects) from AIR applications and/or Flash Panels, as well as generating scripts for Maya. This inspiring session will also explore new color, brush and experimental tools Woohoo has created for Adobe and for his own company with the objectives of streamlining the creative process, while also kicking open the doors to new creative possibilities.
Dr Woohoo & Adobe
Contrary to popular belief, I am not an employee of Adobe. With that said, I am an Adobe vendor and I have had the pleasure of working with them from time-to-time. I am currently in the process of writing some articles/tutorials on Flash Panels via CSXS, SwitchBoard and PatchPanel – so stay tuned.
Just a quick heads up before I head out – some of my latest artwork is available on Moo.com which you can include with your mini + regular sized business cards, stickers, postcards and greeting cards. You can view them Dr. Woohoo on Moo.com.
As the light shines through each hanging kinetic art piece, a color shadow of the printed acrylic design on the surface of each seed of the dandelion falls on the nearest wall. Spinning around to a...
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