GUI widget editor for Photoshop Scripting

[gmitchel]

I wish there was a reliable GUI editor for the Javascript widgets in Photoshop's scripting support. The UI is generally the hardest part of scripting Photoshop.

Cheers,

Mitch

[Doug Nelson]

There's a webpage out there that visually lets you design a script UI, then gives you the code. I can't find it, though. I thought there was a thread about it in the scripting subforum, but I can't locate it.

[gmitchel]

There have been a couple of solutions. CSUIB was unreliable. I found it to be flakey and it took more time to do the UI in CSUIB than to do it by hand, because of that. I saw the site. It's support was limited and mainly to the CS version.

I use Microsoft Visual Studio, since it has similar widgets. The problem is that PS Javascript handles the x- y-coordinates differently than any editor I've ever worked with. I have to do the math to convert every widget.

That's OK when you only have a couple of widgets. But when you have more than a handlful, it's very time-consuming.

I have started to use the layout method. It's faster to add the widgets but gives less control over widget placement. So, again, it works best when you have just a small handful of GUI widgets.

I believe the scripting interface would be used more, if there was a GUI editor. You do have conditional programming. Plus you can do things like temporarily change units to percentages for doing this like extending the canvas for framing effects.

Cheers,

Mitch

[Doug Nelson]

(I split the thread and moved this conversation to a new thread of its own)

I've been after Adobe for years to make scripting more user-friendly. Even if they don't offer a GUI interface, having the commands and their defs in a delimited format so various editor authors could easily port them to their own dictionary format would be very helpful.

However, I suspect it's an investment/return situation. There's not a lot of bottom-up scripters (ie: learning scripting for Photoshop). Rather, I suspect the market is made up of experienced coders that simply have to learn some new variables.