This post from John Nack came up today:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/06/drive_the_creat.html
SwitchBoard brings together the power of the automation in the Creative Suite applications with the potential for third parties to extend the creative process with new applications produced using AIR. The result is an extensible, powerful, cross-platform environment that can quickly adapt to today’s rapidly changing creative workflows.
At the moment SwitchBoard is mainly for talk between CS apps, but given we have python\dotNet interfacing, could anyone see some interesting ideas for development?
Do you mean with automating Photoshop or After Effects?
I mean we’ve had Flash in max for years, but no-one as far as I can see, has really done anything that interesting with it as an interface tool. I’ve had few stabs with my character select demo and joystick demo about 5 years ago, but nothing since then really.
I’ve opened Python “com” connections to Max, PhotoShop and AfterEffects, so the possibility of communitcation is totally pausable… even in real time… I haven’t looked into the whole Air thing yet…
It just seems that AIR has a really good setup in place for linking apps, especially if they’ve got tailored code for CS integration. Being able to render to after effects, or keep a node tree of resource links amongst applications (like Gridiron flow).
Dave, yeah, the flash thing has only been in a few rig scripts as far as I can tell. It would be great to take them further.
Kramsurfer, if you haven’t already, i’d love to see your methods of python linking those apps in the main sticky.
Yeah, I used to create a .jsx file then call afx using shellaunch and a command line switch.
The AIR approach would certainly be a little prettier, and you woudl hopefully be able to check for running instances, as well as scene objects etc.
I like your thinking…