“ScriptUI for Dummies” (2.0)
September 27, 2012 | Extras | en | fr
My colleague and friend, Peter Kahrel, just put online the version 2.0 of his great eBook, “ScriptUI for Dummies”, a free PDF which teaches us everything about designing and scripting user interfaces based on the Adobe CS ScriptUI module.
In many respects, Peter's “dummies guide” has become over time a pure reference guide, which actually is aimed at both beginners and experienced scripters. In a simple layout, richly supplied with screenshots and snippets, it addresses both the basics and very advanced tricks involved in mastering ScriptUI components: dialogs, palettes, statictexts, edittexts, buttons, checkboxes, listboxes, images, treeviews, scrollbars, etc.
Peter wrote, “To my knowledge, the only documentation available on ScriptUI is a chapter in JavaScript Tools Guide… That chapter (…) is a complete reference for the ScriptUI environment, but it is a bit short on examples here and there.” …To say the least! Without help, even highly motivated programmers may stumble over the official reference, which is far from telling the whole truth.
Here are just a few examples of what “ScriptUI for Dummies” explores: resizing windows, making multiple groups of radiobuttons act as a single group, keeping a listbox sorted, processing multi-selection lists, attaching an edit field to a dropdown, exporting a treeview as an XML file, resizing images on the fly, using application icons in your own dialogs, scrolling a panel, accessing your UI from other scripts, dealing with ScriptUI fonts and colors, monitoring the mouse and the keyboard events…
To conclude, “ScriptUI for Dummies” is a bible for anyone who wants to domesticate the wheels of ScriptUI and build efficient user interfaces based on that underestimated technology. Now the icing on the cake: this 100+ pages PDF is both free and regularly updated. “I started doing the guide to straighten out things for myself, Peter says, because I think doing these things is fun, and because I thought others might benefit after reading several ‘cries de cœur’ in the Scripting Forum.” Now I want to publicly thank him for this constant effort and incredible generosity—not to mention the myriad of world renowned scripts he released on his website.
• ScriptUI for Dummies, v. 2.0, 105 pages (PDF), by Peter Kahrel.
