In a commissioned project for Adobe, I have created a large series of tutorials on how-to develop AIR applications and Flash plug-ins that can communicate with and drive primarily Photoshop and Illustrator CS4 using the wide array of developer tools that are now available to us. I have tried to pick up where the existing tutorials that came with the SDKs for Photoshop Panels, SwitchBoard and PatchPanel have left off, while at the same time trying to push the examples further and further as the tutorials progress.
The first two tutorials are now online in Adobe Photoshop’s Developer Center and are dedicated to using Photoshop Panels.
Enhanced Hello World
Follow along with this tutorial to create a Hello World Flash panel for Photoshop. In this exercise, you will create a Flash plug-in within a Flex Builder MXML project. When you run the Flash panel within Photoshop, it will send code to Photoshop that when executed, will display an alert dialog box with a message.
Integrating your ExtendScripts
In order to communicate to the host application (Photoshop or Illustrator CS4) using the CSXSLibrary SWC, our code is sent as a string message via BridgeTalk, which will then be evaluated once it reaches the host application. Not a big deal if we’re only sending a few lines of code at max, but when our ExtendScript code is lengthy, we would either have to manually wrap each line of code up as a string or use the work-around process we will use in this tutorial to simplify our life.
Happy Holidays!
Doc Woohoo.
- was at your FITC 08 workshop on this, glad to see you’re continuing to post on this.
You were right, there are very few resources on this, but I’m really excited about this.
I’m going to start with your tutorials again, then try to create a Photoshop Panel that turns an Array of Strings into individual bitmap images each consisting of whatever the design is with the associated String in the text field.
I’ve really picked up working with ExtendScript, eager to start trying to incorporate AIR with Adobe apps.
Thanks!