CS Extensions have been slated for extinction due to the dependency on Flash, yet their replacement, CC Extensions, have only recently attained near-parity in functionality, and progress was drawn out over a slow 2-year stretch.It is a challenge for developers to keep up with testing the frequent updates, and there have been numerous instances of updates breaking existing 3rd party tools. Release cycles became almost continuous due to the frequent updates of the product.The Creative Cloud release of InDesign posed three parallel challenges for those of us in the development community: From CS4 through CS6, these gave developers an amazing way to build very powerful UI inside the application – some capabilities could never have been offered before, while others became infinitely easier than what had been possible with the C++ SDK.
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The developers who work to build tools such as plugins, and to deploy integrations that make large-scale publishing solutions a success, need to have up-to-date documentation and enough communication with the product team to maintain coordination with evolution of the core product.Įven after InDesign attained greater market share than Quark, Adobe pushed yet further, with our long-requested InDesign Server in the CS2 era, as well as with a beautiful technology called CS Extensions (and their precursor “Patch Panel”). In a large design/authoring workgroup, it is not enough for an application to sit isolated in front of each user with only generic functionality: there is always some form of automation or interface with other systems, such as DAM connectivity, integration with workflow software, or automation of tedious tasks. Doing anything real with desktop authoring tools in large workgroups inevitably demands extensibility: Quark itself had proven this with its ecosystem around XTensions.
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People like Whitney understood that a software product like InDesign has extremely limited usage “as is”, straight out of the box. Adobe gave fantastic support to those of us delivering solutions on top of the product. Adobe kept enhancing this, with both a powerful, well-supported SDK and a magic, cross-platform scripting engine called ExtendScript. The two main ways that InDesign surpassed Quark were extensibility and the ecosystem of developers supporting the product with custom solutions and tools.Īs I have discussed elsewhere, the product already had a wonderful level of extensibility, beyond that of Quark, in its fundamental architecture. I remember walking into pre-press departments in the early 2000s and designers folding their arms, asserting “this is a Quark shop. When InDesign started out, the geniuses who led the evolution of the product (people like Chad Siegel, Mark Niemann-Ross, and Whitney McCleary) were fighting an uphill battle: they had to differentiate themselves from Quark XPress, which still ruled supreme as of InDesign 2.0.
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The declining extensibility of the Creative Cloud is just such a case. Software Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe are generally composed of the most dedicated, brilliant, honorable people, yet the companies as entities can still manage to behave like raving lunatics. Samuel Goldwyn once said, “society, individually, is an idiot: collectively, it is a genius.” With large corporations, the opposite seems to be the case. As big as Adobe is these days, perhaps there is no human being that is directly responsible. Brave Adobe developers found themselves in an awkward middle position: they were sincerely trying to help, and many constructive things came out of the dialog, yet in the end they were simply well-intentioned engineers, hardly all-powerful. The cause of developer frustration was the recent decline in support for extensibility in Creative Cloud products. Yet there was still conflict and confrontation, most notably between a unified group of developers and Adobe. The cool thing about the InDesign ecosystem is that knowledge is shared freely among InDesign developers, without competitiveness.
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It seemed that all of the serious InDesign-related companies were represented: MEI, Typefi, Teacup Software, you name it. Silicon Publishing was out in force at PePcon 2015 in Philadelphia, and as usual it was a true joy to meet pretty much all of the brilliant and talented InDesign developers from around the world: Gabe Harbs ( In-Tools) came from Israel, Kris Coppieters ( Rorohiko) represented New Zealand, Ferdinand Schwoerer ( Movemen) from Germany our own Olav Kvern joined us from Seattle, and three Adobe InDesign engineers travelled all the way from Noida, India.