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Fix For CC 2015.4

Posted by: on: August 4th, 2016 | No Comments

We have been recently getting many complaints that the In-Tools Dashboard would not display installed products on Mac.

This issue had us puzzled for a little while, but we got to the bottom of it today. It turns out that a change in the InDesign folder structure broke the logic we were using to find the active Plug-Ins folder. We’ve implemented a fix and we will be updating our installers. In the meantime, we’ve created an AppleScript which replaces the existing Dashboard which has the bug with a new one that should work correctly.

If you are experiencing the problem and installed products are not appearing as installed, please download this file. After downloading, unzip and double-click on this script. If your computer complains that the script is not trusted, right click and select open which should allow you to run the script.FixCC2015

We have also updated our un-installer script to properly remove CC2015 installations. The Mac uninstaller script can be downloaded from here. Windows does not need an uninstaller because the standard “remove programs” function works.


Keeping CC 2014 Separate

Posted by: on: October 30th, 2015 | No Comments

As a follow-up to the post about the release of CC 2015 support, here’s some important information on making sure your CC 2014 installation does not affect CC 2015.

The original installers for CC 2014 installed some extensions into the location recommended for extensions by Adobe. Unfortunately, this caused weird menus and half-working extensions to appear in CC 2015. Our new installers solve this problem and the installations for CC 2014 and CC 2015 are separate. However, this will not fix existing installations, so here are our recommendations for existing users:

If you are using Windows, you should use the standard Windows uninstaller to remove any existing CC 2014 installation of In-Tools plugins before installing using the new installers. This ensures that menus will only appear in CC 2014 and not CC 2015. After CC 2014 plugins are removed, you can then install in CC 2014 or CC 2015.

If you are a Mac user, we built an AppleScript to fix existing CC 2014 installations. This will work either in tandem or independently from the new installers. You can download the AppleScript here.

We also get regular requests for uninstalling our Plugins. We created an AppleScript for Mac uninstall as well. The uninstaller might remove more than you want. After running the uninstaller script, you should re-run an installers for plugins that you need. The uninstaller script can be downloaded here.


Updates for CC 2015

Posted by: on: October 30th, 2015 | 1 Comment

We’re happy to announce that we have updated all our plugins for CC 2015.

After considering our options for licensing of updates, we have decided to keep our licensing model as it has been until now. Updates for future versions of InDesign will require upgrade licenses as they have in the past. We have a number of reasons of doing so. Probably the biggest reason is that restructuring our licensing would be a lot of work and very little actual gain for either us or our users. The subscription model is becoming more popular today, but the license-and-upgrade model keeps customers in control as to whether they need to upgrade or not, and the older version remains functional indefinitely. Upgrades are half-price as they have been to date.

As we did for CC 2014, we are offering free upgrades to CC 2015 to anyone who purchased a plugin for CC after the release of CC 2015 on Jun 15, 2015. If you qualify, please send us a support request including the details of your purchase.

Please note, that this update includes some important bug fixes for Power Headers and Style Utilities. All CC installers have these updates and we encourage all users to update. We hope to update the pre-CC installers some time next week.

We’ve been getting lots of enqueries about CC 2015 support. By the number of the emails, we can definitely say that Adobe’s strategy to get people to upgrade faster with CC is working. I’m sure lots of people are curious about what took so long to get the update out. There’s lots of reasons, but here’s a few big ones:

Right about the time that CC 2015 was released, it was discovered that there was no official way to create a single Extension and pick whether to install it into CC 2014 or CC 2015. This caused a huge technical challenge for developers who need to support multiple versions and allow installation on one, the other, or both. Multiple requests from developer support resulted in no useful response. I was deeply disappointed by the developer support that we got from Adobe as was many other developers that I know. This problem was so bad that I was not sure it was going to be possible to create updates for CC 2015 at all. Luckily, I discovered a “back door” approach to pick whether the extensions were installed in CC 2014 or CC 2015. Interestingly enough, it turns out that this is the approach Adobe is using internally to install their own extensions but they did not deem third party developers worthy enough to document this approach for us or even tell us this was possible when we explicitly asked.

Suffice it to say that Adobe’s developer support is very broken right now. I hope it gets fixed.

The second issue was actually that InDesign was not ready when it was originally released. There was a bug which caused InDesign to crash when our plugins were added. This bug has been fixed, and you should make sure InDesign is updated to the latest version of CC 2015 before installing our plugins.

Add summer vacation, a holiday season and various other factors to the mix, and here we are now…


Script Bay Update

Posted by: on: May 19th, 2015 | 24 Comments

The last week we got many reports that Script Bay stopped working. Apparently, something went wrong with the signature used many years ago. Most likely, it was a self-signed signature which expired and at the time, there was not an option to use a time stamp to keep the signature valid once it expired.

On a personal note, it was very encouraging to hear that so many people cared that Script Bay stopped working. I don’t get much feedback, and it’s good to know it’s appreciated. :)

It’s been a very long time since I’ve worked on Script Bay and I did not even have the code on my current computer. Thankfully, it was just a matter of checking it out from SVN. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), the code was not really left in a stable state. I had started working on some new features before I stopped working on it and it could not be simply recompiled with a new signature. So, I took the opportunity to fix some issues which needed fixing for a long time:
Script Bay Preferences

The panel should now work much better in CC. The dark UI should be usable. There’s a preference dialog for setting preferences. All data is now saved in user-readable format in the Script Bay directory. This should make trouble-shooting and fixing problems much easier. (You can even hand edit the data if you so desire.)

The preference dialog has a section for setting categories, but it’s currently just a shell and does not work. I left the section in because it would have taken time to strip it out. If I get enough feedback on the feature, I might even finish it, so consider it a teaser… 😉

Of course, the panel is still Flash based, so Script Bay will not work in apps which now only support HTML panels (yes Photoshop, I’m talking about you). It would be a great project to migrate Script Bay to HTML, but I’m going to need a LOT of interest for that to happen…

So, for now, enjoy the new version of Script Bay. You can get it here.

I did not have time to do a lot of QA on this, so please leave a comment if I broke something.

Harbs


All plugins updated for CC 2014

Posted by: on: November 5th, 2014 | 3 Comments

We’re happy to say that we have just updated our installers to include support for InDesign CC 2014.

If you purchased a plugin after the release of CC 2014 on June 18 you can request a free upgrade to CC 2014. To get your free upgrade please send us an email.