Posts in Category "cssdk"

Localizing Adobe Creative Suite 5 Extensions

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Maria Gutierrez | Comments (0)

If you are developing extensions for Creative Suite CS5, you might want to adapt your software to your audience based on their language or specific region. The Creative Suite host applications have been localised to many languages and now you can also localise your extensions so your users will be able to interact with them in their native or preferred language.
Adding multiple locale support doesn’t have to increase your engineering effort. This cookbook recipe explains you how you can localise not only your extension user interface but also the extension configuration.
There is also a sample that puts in practice the steps explained in the cookbook recipe. This image below shows how the same extension can be localised to different languages and also how we can change it’s configuration based on specific locales. The same sample extension is running in an English version of Illustrator, a Japanese version of Flash Pro and a Spanish version of Photoshop.
localised_extension.jpg
If you are using Extension Builder, you can download the “Localised” sample by selecting:
File > Import > Other > Adobe Creative Suite Extension Builder > Remote Creative Suite SDK Samples > Localised

Geolocation inside the Creative Suite

Posted on May 10, 2010 by James Boag | Comments (6)

As part of the Creative Suite Developer Summit we’ve been showing off some sample code that illustrates just how easy certain workflows become when you move into Flash. One of these, that was shown at the session on Connecting the Creative Suite to Web Services (go here to watch), illustrates how you can connect up the Creative Suite to Google Maps and Flickr.

This sample shows an extension built to run in Photoshop, InDesign and Bridge CS5 (and could easily be extended to any product in the Suite). It connects to Google Maps to show location information, and Flickr to show relevant images – with the data used to power those searches customised based on the application the extension runs in. So, in Photoshop this will check the geolocation of the current image (extracted via XMP) and show the images taken nearby. In InDesign it will instead take the location from the machine’s IP address and search based on keywords using the user’s last sentence. Bridge provides a combination of both, where location comes from the XMP and the keywords come from the image tags.

The best part of this is how cheap integration is with these external systems. Google Maps Flex SDK, for example, requires a single MXML entry to create a map, with an additional call into that object being enough to change the positioning of the map;

<maps:Map xmlns:maps=”com.google.maps.*”
    id=”map” width=”263″ height=”229″
    url=”http://code.google.com/apis/maps/”
    key=”SUPER_SECRET_API_KEY”
    x=”30″ y=”10″/>

this.map.setCenter(location,15, MapType.NORMAL_MAP_TYPE);

For Flickr there are plenty of SDK options available, including one for ActionScript, but for the purposes of this I’ve chosen to roll my own calls. This uses a network communications library provided with Extension Builder, which lets us use the minimal amount of code to make a quick call across the network to retrieve the relevant data;

var request:HttpRequest = new HttpRequest(HttpRequest.GET, “http://api.flickr.com”, “/services/rest/”);
request.setParam(“method”, “flickr.photos.search”);
request.setParam(“api_key”, FLICKR_KEY);
request.setParam(“lat”, latLon.lat());
request.setParam(“lon”, latLon.lng());
request.perform(function(response:HttpResponse):void
{
    if (response.succeeded() || response.get_Status() == 0)
    {
        if (response.isParseable())
        {
            // success: XML or JSON response
            var xml:XML = new XML(response.getBodyText());
            for each (var photo:XML in xml.photos.photo) {
            }
        }
    }
});

If you’d like to try this out, you can grab the Extension Builder project here. You’ll need to drop the Google Maps Flex SWC (available here) into the libs folder, and enter your own API key for both the Maps service and Flickr.

I’ve also made it available as a ZXP (here), and as a zip for Bridge (here) the contents of which should be unzipped into your Bridge CS5 user startup scripts folder.