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by mattrandle 4818 days ago
Nice idea and implementation.

Was it difficult building the plugin for photoshop ?

I ask because I have been toying with building a photoshop plugin for handling feedback on designs. i.e. the plugin allows you to upload a design to a website where customers can comment. The plugin would allow you to view the comments from within Photoshop.
2 comments
brianreavis 4818 days ago
Tomorrow I'm going to write a post on all that went into making it. To be honest, it's not difficult to get into—with extensions running on top of AIR, the learning curve isn't steep. The main difficulties come from random platform bugs and poor documentation. Things like:

- Occasionally when a panel starts, the wrapper from Adobe that loads in your extension will be incorrectly sized... which leaves the panel with a giant white space at the bottom. To fix it, increment then decrement the height by one to get it to recalculate its size.

- On CS5.0 (only), the panel is rendered darker than it should be (so if you set the background color to the color the SDK tells you it is, you'll end up something that doesn't match up with the Photoshop UI (this might be mx:HTML specific).

- On CS6, mx:HTML causes a hard Photoshop crash sometimes (no idea why, it's blackbox). Posted on Adobe Forums... no one seems to know.

TL;DR: Barrier of entry is low. Strange issues make it hard. Sadly many of them are out of your control as a 3rd-party developer.

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shuzchen 4818 days ago
brian initially started work on the extension, then I did for a few months, now it's back on brian's plate. In my experience it was rough debugging anything within the webview after being used to the power of chrome dev tools and firebug. For the most part I was able to test the webview bits in an actual browser, but it was those times where the embedded browser behaved differently that really made things rough.

Debugging things within AIR was easy though, and although I had near-nil prior experience with actionscript my javascript background got me up and running right away.

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BHSPitMonkey 4818 days ago
Thanks for sharing those!
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brianreavis 4815 days ago
Just put up a post that gives a complete breakdown of what went into it — https://creativemarket.com/blog/2013/04/12/how-we-built-a-ph...
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