Free scenegraph exploration tool released--every developer needs this!

I’m happy to announce that Layers for Developers is now available through the plugin manager for XD 21 and later (since it’s a panel plugin). I wrote it for people like us who need to see what’s really going on with the scenegraph dynamically. Please give it a whirl and let us know if it’s useful and how it could be improved. (We have lots of ideas–see the product page “Ideas” section–but we hope to set priorities with your feedback.)

From the product page, which also has full documentation:

Layers for Developers is a plugin that shows the current Adobe XD scenegraph selection, the whole document, or the current edit context root, as a dynamically updated, explorable set of nested objects, displaying the API-level properties belonging to the selected items.

It’s invaluable to be able to see what’s really going on with scenegraph object internals as you develop plugins, or are just curious about the structure of your XD document.

The end-user Layers panel displays the scenegraph object tree in a somewhat idealized manner; Layers for Developers shows the selection/root/edit context root in exactly the form a plugin would see.

It covers the entire documented API for scenenodes including helper classes, except for Interactions, which I need to add.

More: Layers 4 Developers » Em Software.

Deep link for direct installation:

https://xd.adobelanding.com/en/xd-plugin-download/?name=6440ed65

A screenshot to give you a flavor of the UI (click to see larger):

7 Likes

Thanks for sharing this!

Most welcome. Just hope others find it useful.

And would love feedback for improvements.