“Do You Plan to Have your Products CC-Compliant?!”
January 30, 2014 | Extras | en | fr
A lot of users and customers are anxiously awaiting updates of BookBarcode, IndexMatic, and other Indiscripts' tools that still refuse to properly work in InDesign CC. “Why does it take so long to have my favorite script running in my new environment?”, they ask…
This morning I received an email that summarizes the growing misunderstanding: “Many of my peers and contacts have ignored Adobe's latest brain child and are sticking with the older version. I am therefore wondering if you have stopped your support for InDesign for the same reason.” Many Indiscripts fans also say they love(d) my products but now feel stuck. To top it off, I promised updates or fixes for several months—or even years for certain products.
So what is this all about?
• Indiscripts products are based on two technical layers, ExtendScript and ScriptUI. The former allows the script to interact with InDesign and provides the essential functionalities (what the script actually does). The latter allows you to interact with the script and provides what we programmers call the “User Interface” (UI) based on dialogs, buttons, and so on.
• From InDesign CS4 to now, including CC, the ExtendScript layer has remained extremely stable. That is, the main code of each script (Wordalizer, BookBarcode, IndexMatic, etc.) is quite safe and only requires some slight adjustments when a new version of InDesign is coming. In terms of scripting architecture InDesign is arguably the most accomplished application among the Creative suite and cloud.
• But, something ironic and unfortunate happened with Creative Cloud: the ScriptUI layer has been heavily altered. At the very beginning ScriptUI was something of a bridge between our scripts and your Operating System. Dialogs, buttons, listboxes, or user events were simply rendered and processed by the OS. There were boring bugs in that bridge but, at least, programmers could step in and circumvent issues in a predictable way. CC introduced a new paradigm: ScriptUI is now a bridge between our scripts and some internal Adobe brick (Drover) that fully manages the look-and-feel of UI components.
So what? Isn't it cool to have pretty OS-independent ScriptUI interfaces that fit the new skin of CC apps?
• Yes it is, but ScriptUI CC does not work very well, to say the least. It does not seem that Adobe has considered a priority to maintain the historical features of ScriptUI. At the launch of Creative Cloud in June 2013 script developers have been taken aback and alerted Adobe. From then, the dev team has very gradually restored, or reconnected, lost functionalities. However, many of us still expect the return of ScriptUI fonts or the fixing of very serious bugs in the UI event loop!
• On several occasions I was advised to simply give up ScriptUI and use a new technology to offer sexy interfaces for my scripts. As far as I can see, going towards Flash/Flex wouldn't have been a choice for the future! My colleagues tell me I'm stubborn. Well, I only ask Adobe that ScriptUI works as expected. This technology is a minimum for those who create process-oriented scripts. It should be the best option for those who focus on ExtendScript and do not consider that “programming is just having fun in making UI.”
• Also, my policy is to provide—whenever possible—backward-compatible scripts. User feedback shows InDesign CS4 is still at work on many workflows! In this context, converting all my products into HTML5 extension panels doesn't seem relevant to me.
Then, going back to the original question, my answer is: Indiscripts definitely plans to have its products CC-compliant. In fact, under the hood—at the processing level—they already are! The whole problem is that the surface layer, ScriptUI, is not yet fully operational in CC. And this does not depend on me :(
Thank you all for your understanding.
Comments
Hi Marc,
I agree with you that ScriptUI should be (have been) backwards compatible. That that is not the case is very bad. I also agree with you that looking for other UI tools is not a good option for several reasons. You don't want to rewrite your scripts, and, more importantly, many 'new technologies' are abandoned by Adobe not long after their introduction. Even Flash/Flex, much advertised and idolised, appears to be discontinued and developers who embraced it now have to look elsewhere.
ScriptUI, despite its problems, was a perfectly serviceable system for script interfaces. Adobe should continue to support it.
Peter
À l'instant même où j'ai lu le mot « abonnement » au sujet des mises à jour CS j'ai su que c'était une mauvaise affaire… sauf pour Adobe.
@ Christian
Je comprends votre réaction mais je ne voudrais pas, pour ma part, faire d'amalgame entre la politique commerciale d'Adobe et sa politique « technologique ».
Assurément, l'une et l'autre doivent répondre de critiques sérieuses, mais je crois qu'il serait déloyal de ne pas les distinguer, car ce ne sont pas les mêmes personnes auxquelles nous nous adressons dans l'un et l'autre cas.
Indiscripts est une micro-entreprise indépendante, ce qui me laisse la possibilité de parler très librement de ces sujets. Je n'ai aucune obligation « éditoriale » vis-à-vis d'Adobe, mes attaches avec cette société sont fondamentalement techniques — et j'observe qu'elles sont au demeurant très cordiales.
Ainsi, je dois à l'honnêteté de préciser ceci : les quelques contacts que je cultive avec Adobe France se sont toujours montrés très attentifs aux problèmes soulevés. Les personnes avec lesquelles j'échange sollicitent activement des retours de bugs et communiquent sans faux-fuyant sur ces questions.
Mon sentiment est donc que les développeurs et les départements focalisés sur la technique — au moins pour le pôle InDesign — restent honnêtement très attachés à l'évolution du produit et à la satisfaction des utilisateurs. (Comment pourrait-il en être autrement, d'ailleurs ?)
Maintenant, je crois aussi que la machine commerciale a poussé ces techniciens, de toute force et de toute urgence, dans des impasses stratégiques. C'est mon ressenti. Par exemple, nous sommes quelques-uns à penser ici-bas que l'obsession quasi mystique pour l'EPUB et pour le Cloud a fait dévier InDesign de ses fondamentaux.
Et on le regrette d'autant plus que cette application demeure, à nos yeux, un produit inégalé au carrefour de l'édition, du design et de la typographie.
Cordialement,
Marc
@ Marc
Je suis absolument d'accord. Je n'avais pas précisé mais je n'ai jamais fait l'amalgame entre le département développement et le département marketing. Je sais, pour l'avoir vécu, qu'aujourd'hui c'est le marketing qui impose sa loi à tous les autres secteurs d'une entreprise.
Et je peux ajouter que j'ai été enchanté des deux ou trois contacts que j'ai pu avoir avec des personnes chez Adobe France.
Le cloud, l'Epub… j'arrête de suite, je n'en finirais pas.
J'en suis au point pour répondre aux exigences de mes clients d'avoir la quasi-totalité des versions sur mes bécanes (CS3, CS4, CS5, CS6 & CC). Et donc à jongler entre les scripts et les versions...
Sinon CC est affreusement plus lourd à gérer pour des bécanes un peu anciennes (30% à ce que j'ai pu tester)
IndexMatic2 Pro: Marc. Un produit indispensable. Je contiuerai en anglais si ça ne vous gêne pas :-). Great Product! I hope we can find a way to do a hybrid between the wordlist approach and the built-in index approach. I want to tag specific instances of certain words so as to index them specially. E.G. Where a word is defined. I've tried to put hidden characters in front of this instance of the word but Indexmatic seems to ignore them. Unless I don't understand the \W command. And also I would like a "do not index this occurence". There are probably workarounds. I'm all ears. Merci. Thanks!
Hi Bob,
[What a nice coincidence, I'm a big fan of your famous "Mastering Audio" book :]
Thanks a lot for your kind feedback on IndexMatic.
> I want to tag specific instances of certain words so as
> to index them specially. E.G. Where a word is defined.
In short the best way to do this is (usually) to apply a specific character style to those targeted words then to capture them using IndexMatic's style filter in addition to queries.
Anyway I suggest that we continue this conversation via email if you need more technical answers. Feel free to contact me at:
marc [at] indiscripts {dot} com
Best regards,
Marc