Scriptplayground Network

Just hours after Adobe released the Flash CS3 Air Compiler, they have released an update to the Flash Player.

Here is what got updated/added:

• Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs
• Multi-core support for vector rendering.
• Full screen mode with hardware scaling.
• Flash Player cache…
• more

Seems the Adobe Labs has been very busy these last few weeks.

Adobe has released a CS3 Update which now offers the ability to build AIR applications in Flash CS3. Now is the time, start developing some sweet AIR applications!

The Adobe® Integrated Runtime (AIR) update for Flash® CS3 beta 1 software will allow you to package and preview .air application files directly within Adobe Flash CS3; leveraging your existing Flash development skills to build desktop-enabled distributed applications and experiences with the Adobe AIR™ framework.

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR:Flash_CS3_Professional_Update

The CS3 icons have been a topic of discussion around the graphics world. Some like the stock icons, others find them to be a poor example from a creative company… I am with the latter on this one, the CS3 icons just aren’t a great thing, especially on the Mac OS X dock where there are so many great icons.

That being said, some others have built custom icon packs, such as a simple rounded rectangle and others that tie into the branding of CS3. Those new icons really do look nice on the dock, as shown here:

This is what the second option looks like, kind of harder to see a difference in at smaller sizes, but still cool:

I have been working with the scripting in Photoshop CS3 a little more and quickly found some very useful resources and tools.

First in the list of useful resources is the scripting listener which can be found in “Scripting Guide/Utilities/”. In order to make this work you drag the “ScriptingListener.plugin” into the “Plug-Ins” directory and restart Photoshop. Once the listener is installed and restarted you are ready to start script watching.

Photoshop will spit out a log file (named “ScriptingListenerJS.log” on the Mac) to your desktop. Here is a sampling of what that listener returns

var id1 = charIDToTypeID( "Opn " );
var desc1 = new ActionDescriptor();
var id2 = charIDToTypeID( "null" );
desc1.putPath( id2, new File( "/Users/mkeefe/Desktop/Picture 4.png" ) );
executeAction( id1, desc1, DialogModes.NO )

Basically what that does is opens an image “Picture 4.png”on my Desktop. Of course at first glance you are probably scratching your head, but don’t be alarmed it is fairly simple to understand.

Lets go through it line by line.
Line 1: setup character id of “Opn ” which is “Open”
Line 2: set an action for photoshop to reference
Line 3: make a path reference for the file we want to open
Line 4: Last but not least, we actually call the desired action passing in the variables we set in the last few lines.

I will be writing up some more in depth articles on scriptplayground.com once I get some more free time.

Thanks to Jeff Tranberry and Thomas Ruark for answering my list of questions at PhotoshopWorld. In fact Jeff is hte one that alerted me to this scripting listener at his “Photoshop for Geeks” session at PhotoshopWorld Boston.

In the next part I will explain the “Object Library” browser.

I just noticed that Adobe has started shipping the Design and Web suites. You can pick up a copy on the Adobe store or on Amazon.

Overall I am thrilled to see this finally released, really looking forward to seeing what people start creating with all this great integration between the new products.