ScriptUI and ESTK

[Roy Marshall]

Hi All.

I was looking at an old post Progress Bar bug. Summary of the situation and was getting concerned about the future for ScriptUI.

Is there any update on the ongoing support of this valuable part of the Scripting toolbox?

Also, and on a slightly different topic, with the ongoing removal of Flash form the CC2017 application (which I have no real opinion on) and with Adobes future end of life plan in 2020 for Flash, does this have any knock-on effect with ESTK? I know the main code editor is not, but the Object Model Viewer looks like it is Flex/Flash based.

I would dearly love to see some attention put into the ESTK, or even somehow open it up so we can use VS Code as our editor. That is an AWESOME IDE in my humble opinion.

Anyway, just had to see if anyone else has some insight on these two matters.

Cheers

Royston

[Loic.Aigon · Accepted solution]

Hi,

IMHO ScriptUI is dead. I heard recently that even as its beginnings, the InDesign engineers were not encouraged to use it leading to the appearance of the Dialogs class inside InDesign's DOM. The main issue is that there isn't anymore support and bugs keep on going and going CC updates after CC updates.

I adknowledge and admire the guys who are able to achieve amazing stuff with ScriptUI. I like ScriptUI myself and sometimes it's all you can go with but I won't bet too many on it for the future.

Flash disappearance hasn't waited for 2020 to hit Adobe Apps. In ScriptUI, you could some years ago use swf UIs inside a scriptUI panel and communicate between the swf and the jsx layers but that's gone since CC2014 (I think).

As for ESTK, I don't really know Adobe plans but there aren't any specific reasons to get rid of it but I won't bet on any specific updates or improvements. Many of us write codes on other IDEs and then debug inside the ESTK or use it for encryption(jsxbin).

If you need a DOM viewer, there are also great utilities that are far better than the ESTK OVM. Think of those:

Adobe InDesign CS6 (8.0) Object Model JS: Table of Contents

or

InDesign ExtendScript API (12.0)

Loic

[Roy Marshall]

Hey Loic.

I have had v11 of Jongwares DOM viewer downloaded on my Mac for a while now. I wasnt aware of version 12, so getting that now.

So do you think the future for scripts (involving panels, and dialogs) would be solely HTML CEP extensions?

I do write these too, but its just not as convenient as firing up ESTK, and writing a quick ScriptUI to get the job done.

Thanks for the response

[TᴀW]

Hi Loic,

I'm not sure I agree that ScriptUI isn't being maintained. Bug fixes are being released: For instance, Adobe recently released a fix specifically for the issue that InDesign crashed when using a tabbed scriptUI window.

Ariel

[Peter Truskier]

Hi Ariel,

What version you referring to here?

For instance, Adobe recently released a fix specifically for the issue that InDesign crashed when using a tabbed scriptUI window.

I've been debugging an issue with an old script that makes use of a ScriptUI tabPanel. It works in all versions up to CC 2017, but crashes both CC 2017 and CC 2018 as soon as the window is closed.

You got my hopes up, as I discovered I had an update that I hadn't installed. Sadly, even after updating to 12.1.0.56, it still crashes...

Thanks for any insight.

-- Peter

[Peter Kahrel]

Paraphrasing Frank Zappa: 'ScriptUI is not dead, it just smells funny'.

[Loic.Aigon]

Solely cep extensions ? Certainly not ! Scriptui will remain for a while but it's not maintained and that's the issue. We clearly need either an updated version of scriptui which is unmikely to happen or a new ui medium for scripts which won'th happen neither.

[Loic.Aigon]

Hi Ariel

believe me if i say i am happy to be wrong

[Loic.Aigon]

He is not dead !! He is resting !

[Peter Kahrel]