Adobe AIR is in Your Creative Suite, Firing Scripts
Adobe has rolled out a new release of AIR, the company’s on/offline web app development framework. AIR 1.1 is primarily a localization update with additional language support. But coinciding with the release is a new development framework that appears to open the door to AIR-based photo editing applications.
It isn’t ready for prime time just yet, but Adobe has taken the wraps off SwitchBoard, an AIR framework for interacting with Adobe Creative Suite apps.
SwitchBoard is a Flex library (ActionScript 3.0) that allows AIR apps to have roundtrip communications with, for instance, Adobe PhotoShop.
Although the documentation is a bit vague, it looks like developers will be able to hook into Photoshop’s native scripting language through their AIR apps. That means, in theory, that your AIR app could send an image to Photoshop, fire off a Photoshop script, for instance a recorded Lomo-effect script, and then pipe the results back to the AIR app.
So far there don’t seem to be an example applications available, but according the Adobe Labs page, the tools make creating more sophisticated AIR apps much simpler.
Adobe AIR developers can create applications that participate as first class citizens in creative workflows. Each SwitchBoard solution consists of an AIR application written for SwitchBoard, JavaScripts, and the SwitchBoard service that delivers the scripts to the Creative Suite applications. AIR developers only need to include a Flex library called SwitchBoard.swc in their projects in order to send and receive scripts to and from Creative Suite applications.
If SwitchBoard sounds appealing, you can grab the installer and SDK through the Adobe Labs site.
[via John Nack]
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