Script Bay: Script Panel Replacement for the Entire Creative Suite!

We are very excited to introduce Script Bay!

Script Bay is a FREE script panel replacement for the entire Creative Suite CS5.

It currently works in InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. It is partially compatibility with Flash and Fireworks and to a lesser extent, Bridge.

No, Script Bay will not work in CS4 or earlier. It’s built using the new CS SDK which Adobe introduced for CS5. It’s quite impossible to make it compatible with any version of the Creative Suite prior to CS5. Sorry…

Script Bay is very much a “work in progress”, but it is already far more usable than the script panel in InDesign, and without question more usable than the non-existing ones in Photoshop, Illustrator! We hope to add many exciting new features to Script Bay in the future!

Here’s a quick overview of the current features:

• Script Bay offers the ability to run scripts located anywhere on your hard drive.
• Scripts can be viewed in either a list-view or tree-view.
• The list of scripts can be dynamically filtered, and scripts can be launched via keyboard navigation.
• Scripts can be edited directly in the built-in Script Bay script editor.
• Multiple scripts or folders full of scripts can be run in a single command.
• Script files can be moved, duplicated, deleted, and renamed directly within the panel.
• Scripts run in the Script Bay panel can be undone in InDesign as a single undo.
• Scripts can be easily “installed” into the host application.
• Script Bay has a default “cross-application” folder, and scripts placed in this folder are automatically available to all CS applications.
• Script Bay supports drag & drop for moving around script files as well as loading scripts into the script editor.
• Scripts can be added to Script Bay from anywhere on your hard drive by simple drag & drop.

We have more exciting plans for Script Bay, and we hope you enjoy Script Bay as much as we do!

Installation:

1. Download the latest build of Script Bay from here.
2. Double click on the zxp file which should open Extension Manager CS5. (If you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7 with UAC active, you might need to launch Extension Manager as an administrator first.)
3. Upon launching Extension Manager and initiating the installation, you will see the following window:
   
   Click Accept.
4. You will then see this scary window:
   Click install. Don’t worry. All this means is we didn’t yet spend a few hundred dollars on a fancy electronic signature to make this scary window go away.

Use:

Once installed using the Extension Manager, Script Bay will be available for use in all the supported Creative Suite applications. With the exception of InDesign, Script Bay is available via a menu item in the Extensions sub-menu under the Window menu. In InDesign and InCopy, it is available in the same sub-menu as the built-in Script panel (i.e. in the Utilities sub-menu.)

Using Script Bay should be very self explanatory. You can launch a script by double clicking on it, by right clicking and selecting run script, or by clicking on the Run button. If multiple scripts are selected, the run button will run them all.

For a script to be edited in Script Bay’s script editor, the script editor must be visible. You can reveal the script editor by clicking on the code button:

Once the script editor is open, you can click on the “edit” button to load the currently selected script, or just drag a script into the editor area from either the script list or tree, or from a file in you computer’s file system.

When you are finished editing the script, you can run it directly from the editor to test that it works correctly, or save it into the currently selected folder.

To quickly run a script, you can type part of the script name into the script filter, and launch the script by hitting “return”.

Known Issues:

1. Drag and Drop does not work perfectly in all the applications. The application which apparently has the most issues is Photoshop. The problems apparently stem from some bugs in the CS SDK, and Adobe is working on solving these issues.
2. Scripts in InDesign are all run under a single persistent engine. #targetengine directives are currently ignored. We hope to deal with this issue at a later date.
3. The script editor currently supports Javascript and ExtendScript only. AppleScript and VBScript can not be run from the script editor.
4. Applescripts and VBScripts in Photoshop and Illustrator do not currently work when run from Script Bay.
5. A number of the commands do not yet work in Fireworks and Flash. These include Rename, Open, Reveal, Install, and Reveal Installed Scripts.

Here’s a few screen shots:

Posted: July 25th, 2010 under Script Bay.
Tags: Creative Suite, CS5, Extension Builder, Script Bay, Scripting

Comments