I’m really curious about how hard is to fix the issue with the “no compatible software is installed” a lot of users have with our plugins. Isn’t as easy as letting Creative Cloud electron app search on other drives?
This is a real question because I need to understand why It haven’t been fixed and why we need to create workarounds for our software to work properly in Adobe’s environment.
EDIT:
Sorry If I sound harsh, I understand there’s a lot going on behind but If we can help somehow I would be happy to help to solve this issue from my engineer side.
Isn’t as easy as letting Creative Cloud electron app search on other drives?
I do know that UXP does not support installing plugins on other drives, so if your users are running Photoshop from an external drive you’re probably getting that error… in this case the error messaging isn’t specific enough.
There are other scenarios that trigger that error as well - if, for example, you just installed Premiere and haven’t opened it yet, I’ve seen the “no compatible software” error.
I’ve also seen this issue if you only have a Beta build installed with no Release build. For example in Premiere, you need to have a Release build installed with the right version to install a UXP plugin, otherwise UPIA / CC App won’t think there is a compatible app.
@Erin_Finnegan I know it’s not recommended, but for scenarios like this were UPIA cannot be installed the regular way, is there anything wrong with installing UXP plugins the old fashion way by extracting the .ccx to a specific folder per OS:
Obviously this has the side effect of not instantly updating the app’s database meaning the UXP plugin won’t appear until relaunch, much like CEP, but for scenarios like @photonic’s and also unsupported systems like Windows ARM, it’s been our recommended approach so far.
I wasn’t sure if this folder is likely to change in the future or if there are any other drawbacks from manual installations that I’m not considering.
Thanks for the info Erin! I know that the underlying can be complex specially with legacy code, but I think if we get more info about the error we could give a proper direction to the users, or they could even solve them themselves.
Having a error message like (e.g.): “- Error code 2” is useless for the user, of course for the developer who knows the architecture of UXP they know what could be causing that error or where in the code is happening, but as user feedback is just a frustration or empty error, something more like “Error: cannot install plugin because Adobe Photoshop and the plugin installer (.ccx) paths differ, please make sure you are installing the plugin from the same drive, Creative Cloud needs to be on the same path as well”. In that way the error message is doing what the error message is meant to to, “guidance” on how to solve the error and what is causing it.
The installation should be straight forward, like apps do just clicking double clicking on the file (.exe, .dmg, etc), I know .ccx files are installed with a CLI so the solutions is just rebuild that CLI to manage the error?
I’m always looking for solutions to problems as a dev, so I know there’s always a more efficient way to make things in less steps, users doesn’t know any of this, only us as devs, they only want a straight forward installation, the frustration sometimes make them or even to us makes us throw the software away, because the UX there lacks even if the software is great.
Right… providing people with an error code rather than link or actionable message is not optimal. You have take number and then know there are 3 different pages with those error codes and find it in there. This is more work than necessary.
That message should be in dialog. Maybe with link to page where more details are provided if needed. @poonamst
An alternative could be to have an installer as we did for CEP. (like InnoSetup) And just extract files into specific folder. I think that is more reliable, but it has different challenges you or user need to deal with.