What are symbolic links? REALLY OVER SIMPLIFIED they are hyped-up shortcut files that placed in one folder (the destination) point to a file or folder (the source) and are treated as the source. There are many different types of symbolic links and you can Google to find out the differences between the different types and the difference between them and regular shortcut / link files. Why would you want to use symbolic links? For extension development it makes no sense to keep your repositories in app folders 😜. Changes in the extensions will be reflected without the need to reinstall the extensions. You can add a restart "button" to the extension's html and then you don't even need to restart the app. One can normally use something as simple as <a href="./index.html"> Restart </a>. The system extension folder require Admin rights which can be a real pain for a development environment, if the a symbolic link is used one doesn't need Admin rights to make changes to the extension. (Another simple workaround is to use the user level extensions folder see Where to plonk my Adobe extensions?) How can we setup symbolic links? There are various user interface tools but … Read More
JSX.js A Game Changer in Adobe HTML Extensions Development?
JSX.js is a simple API to significantly speedup and simplify your extensions development. The manifest.xml is the file that instructs the CEP engine about the setup of the extension, in which host applications should it be run, what should be the dimensions of the UI if any, etc. etc. and the location of the "index.html" and "host.jsx", well thus goes the manual. The problem with the manual's approach is that every time you make a change in the host.jsx you have to restart the application to see the change. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just at a click of a button and in an instance restart the extension so that all the changes in all the files including the jsx files are reflected? Well it's dead simple, at least when someone's done the tough stuff for you. Also wouldn't it be nice if executing jsx scripts from the js engine was made really simple without the need of "quoting" + every + "other" + word? Wouldn't it be nice if when we run our jsx scripts they can know there own path? If the answer to those question is yes then continue reading otherwise adios amigos On some … Read More
Adobe HTML Panels Development
What you need to know & where to find it?
So your are or you want to be a "HTML Panels Developer". What do you need to know to be successful and where can you find the answers? Well your number one resource, . When you have a question use your favorite search engine and go for it. Often the search will come up with a result from Stackoverflow, more often than not these results are very useful. (See below for the HTML extensions specific links.) Need to knows: Git When you start a project after you've created your empty project folder you need to do a git init. What is git and why is it so important? Git tracks the changes you make to the files in the project. It can show you them and revert to them and a very lot more. There is a huge amount written on git, I have a book of about 500 pages on it, but what you need to know is about 1 or 2 pages worth, so don't panic. Once you have done your git commit you want to upload it to an online private repository, this will be useful as a backup and an easy way of getting the extension … Read More
Setting Cep Debug Mode and Log Level the Easy Way
Here's a real basic level post on a topic that's not documented quite as it should be. As well know in order to get an unsigned extension to work one has to set up the debug mode, this is dead easy. To set the debug level. Set debug mode on Mac from Terminal Copy Set debug mode on Windows from CMD (Command line) Copy To turn off the debug mode do the same just changing the 1 that comes after PlayerDebugMode to 0. Thanks to Kris Coppieters for the killall -u `whoami` cfprefsd method of killing cfprefsd, this method is easier than other documented ones. To set the log level. Set the log level on Mac from Terminal Copy Set the log level on Windows from CMD (Command line) Copy The log levels are as follows. So change the 6 in the above snippets to value of the level you want. The examples here are for CEP 11 (CC 2021). For CEP 8 change the CSXS.9 to CSXS.8 for CEP10* to CSXS.10 etc. NOTE: Setting the debug mode to the updated CEP version is the #1 reason that extensions stop working when a new CC version comes out. *We were … Read More