Introduction (Martin), Thanks, and Wish-List

Hi All,

I’ve been lurking here from time to time over the last month as I worked on my new plugin which is now in for review. My name is Martin Bailey. I’m British born but now a Japanese citizen based in Tokyo.

Looking at Kerri’s self-introduction we are probably twins in an alternate universe, as we both started programming on a Commodore 64, but I chose photography as my main career, and music is my hobby-passion. I’ve been developing on and off since the nineties, and my latest UXP Plugin will replace a set of 12 scripts that I whipped together in an afternoon in 2013 to help me add a frame and offset the image within the frame for a Fine Art print feel. The scripts literally took me an afternoon and have sold pretty well since.

I noticed the release of UXP and figured I’d spend another afternoon and update my scripts. 33 days later with considerably larger bags under my eyes than when I started, I finally have something in for review. I also developed an iOS and Apple Watch app that has been popular, but honestly, this last month has been much harder. I would like to thank everyone in this community for sharing your knowledge though. Without the answers to some great questions I found here I could not have completed my plugin.

Anyway, as per the topic title, I have a small wish-list that I wanted to share, and although I realize this may not be the place to do this, I don’t want to throw it into another forum and get shouted at, although this doesn’t seem like that kind of forum.

So, my main wish is for the Action Recording support that I see is on the way, but not here yet. My old scripts could easily be included in actions by simply selecting them from the menu while recording. Even though I have implemented some of the key processes as commands in the short-cut menu of my plugin, they don’t get recorded, and this will cause a regression in functionality of my new shiny UXP based plugin over my relatively inflexible scripts.

I also missed the ability to simply store and set the foreground and background colors from my plugin. This was easy when I developed my scripts, but I could not figure out how to do this for my current release, although I realize it is probably possibly via batchplay, but it escaped me.

I would also like to see the clipboard opened up to the UXP API. I have a few scenarios where being able to use the clipboard would enhance the plugin, but when I try to call it I see a message in the console that use of the clipboard is currently not supported. Please consider removing this restriction.

There are other things, but I have been able to work around much of it with batchplay commands, so I’ll leave it at that for now. I’m looking forward to getting my review results and look forward to spending more time in this community as I continue to enhance my plugin.

Regards,
Martin Bailey.

2 Likes

Hi Martin!!! Welcome!

Would you be interested in writing an Adobe Tech Blog post about migrating your scripts? (Even if it’s critical of UXP!) Bonus points for a Japanese translation :hugs: (mostly because @Ten_A would retweet it)

Hi Erin,

Thanks for the welcome!

I’d love to write a post for the Adobe Tech Blog, but I’m a little concerned that it might not be up to scratch, because I’m not really educated as a developer. I can do it, and I studied computer science at college here in Japan, but I’m mostly self-taught, so my terminology might be so far off that it doesn’t really make sense. Would it be OK for me to write something (in English to begin with) and you or someone on the team check it, and let me know if it makes sense, before you commit to posting it?

Regards,
Martin.