Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Zoom & Center v.2

I've made a tiny change to "Zoom and Center".
Now, when nothing is selected, instead of complaining, the view zooms to 100% but remains centered at the current location.
The closest thing Illustrator has to this is cntrl-1 which zooms to 100, but centers to the page rather than keeping placement.
I do a LOT of design for the web, and being able to quickly zoom my current view to 100% allows me to check my work at the size it will be rendered.
It's a tiny change, but it makes me happy. :)

Thursday, July 27, 2006

New Icons!!!

A few weeks ago, D. McGlaughlin and I set out to create a new "theme" for all my JS4AI icons.
He sketched out a few ideas, and we eventually gravitated toward a "scroll" feel. Early on we canned the idea of creating a "mascot", since I wanted something that would be easily updatable.
Once we did start work on the vector scroll layout, the build process went really smoothly.
The final template is almost drag-and-drop simple and I've been having a lot of fun over the past week creating the new icons. Now they're finally finished, and I'm very pleased with the way they turned out.
Scriptwise, I spent some time cleaning up the wording on some of the file headers today.
I have a small list of things to tweak, but really nothing much on the burner for public scripts.
Of course, I'll post a note here when I think of something new.
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The only actual change in coding this last week has been a bugfix in the "delete Fluff" script where under certain circumstances a spot color was not accurately recognized. There still appears to be another less critical, but slightly more complicated issue with that script where it fails on the first try. I can't get the problem to repeat, but once I narrow down an example failure, I should have itfixed within a day. I suspect it might have something to do with Apple's version allowing identical swatches...
Thanks to J. Reumann for finding the bugs.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Two new Scripts

Here they are... Say "Hello" to:

Align Text Field To Center (Or to whatever you set it to)
and
Join Text Frames, the converse of my "divide text frames" script.

I'll let them speak for themselves.

They both make my life easier. I hope they are as good for you.

enjoy,
-J

Sunday, June 18, 2006

New JS4AI Page

This weekend I finally automated my JS4AI page, and just to be clear, I coded the page using Perl, not PERL.


Thanks to the magic of web scripting, my JavaScripts write themselves...

Well, OK not really, but at least the page updates itself.

I now have a nice uniform facade to show the world, and a faster way to update my stuff.

I think I'll write something new to celebrate. :)
Stay tuned!
-J

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Bonjour From France

I got my first script related email from France today. I had to use Babelfish to translate it, but I was able to understand and respond in kind. Problems with CMYKtoPMS... No surprise there... I wrote a few suggestions, and hopefully babelfish was as good at translating my English back to French. :)
No real script news. Just kinda cool to get letters from folks that don't speak English... :)

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Scripting is fun

I got an email from Aubanel MONNIER of Esterel Technologies who asked my permission to host a new "Stick to CMYK Palette" script which he modified from my "Randomize Colors" script.

He asked about my copyright arrangement, and it made me think a bit more about it. I do this for fun, but have been a bit lax about uniformity. I think in the near future I will create a template for the top of all my scripts, and then use PERL (I mean Perl... ) to extract it for display on my main JS4AI page.

It was cool to get another email about a script though.
I love to see what other people do with my scripts.

I'm doing a lot of scripting now, but it's all internal company stuff, so it's nothing the general public can appreciate, still I'm having a lot of fun making people's jobs easier, and as I work, my library grows, so who knows what will come of it...
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I got another email last week about Wolfgang Resel's "DeEmbed" script. I sent him an email, and he quickly fixed it. The good news is that, in the process of tracking him down, I found the new link to all the JS archives on hilfdirselbst.com and updated the link on the bottom of my page. It was cool to see my name and work on a total strangers site. :)

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Ahh Adobe how you kill me...

I installed the CS2 patch last week... I quickly discovered that it broke half of my scripts. I spent several hours with Adobe's lovely script IDE, but it kept choking on basic things like "app.activeDocument" after banging my head for a while, I noticed that some other scripts that used the EXACT SAME CODE were running fine.
I searched the Scripting Forums for an answer, but got nothing.

I tested the IDE with the script that WAS working, and it choked at the same place. I immediately closed the IDE and went back to using editPlus.

I discovered that the © copyright symbol (inside a COMMENT TAG!!!) was killing my scripts. I quickly fixed all scripts and uploaded the changes... OK, problem solved with minimal pain...

But the story does not end there. I went to Adobe's Studio Exchange and noticed that my "vary hues" got a 1 star rating from someone who experienced the same problem. I cannot comment on the post, I cannot delete the post, I can only "report abuse" but that doesn't give me a chance to explain to Adobe why I'm reporting the "abuse".

I went to Adobe's support page and filled out a form stating that I was having a problem with the exchange's user interface. The form stated in bold at the bottom that Adobe would get back to me in a day or two.

This is a copy of my letter:

Usability of the "Adobe Studio Exchange" for Contributors.

I'd like to request that you improve the management of the comments/rating system. I posted "Vary Hues" and it got a 5 star rating from the first user, then due to an inconsistency in the way text is handled by the CS2 upgrade, the script stopped working and another user rated it a 1 star. I've fixed the problem, but now I have a 3 star rating, and no way to inform users that the bug was there, or was fixed.

My only option for addressing it seems to be the "report abuse" button, but then I am unable to explain what the problem is.

I enjoy developing scripts for Illustrator, but posting them on the exchange is becoming a frustrating process for me.
Please send me some sort of feedback so I know Adobe is listening.


5 minutes after submitting the form I got a CGI response that reads:

We're very sorry, but Adobe is unable to provide answers to technical support questions via e-mail. However, extensive complimentary online resources are available at

http://www.adobe.com/misc/ts.html



Oh the irony.. :)
---------------------EDIT-------------------
Good news, the person who gave my script a bad review updated his review, and my "vary hues" script now has the stars it deserves. :) Thanks man.
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Monday, March 13, 2006

Thanks Iain

Wow, I got an email last week from Australia! Iain from addition.com liked one of my scripts and gave it an upgrade! He hacked "copy to object" so it does multiple copies at once! His hack also showed me a neat way to dynamically assign variables in JS, which I thought was not possible.

His feedback inspired me to play some more with JS, and I popped out 2 new scripts, "organify" and "scallop." Check 'em out. Both are v.1, so they're not very flexible, but they work, and they work well.

I've noticed in the last few months that Adobe's Studio Exchange site has been down more often than not. Are they telling us something? Well, I've decided not to post my new scripts there, so all the latest stuff will be here only.

cheers,
-J