Am I just dumb, or is Photoshop development just unforgivably lame?
Forget that the API dates to like 1996. Forget that the documentation starts you off with a discussion of what fricking Hypercard did for plugins. Forget that there is no obvious place to start, and that documentation is not sorted by year, and that it frequenly refers explicitly to out of date documents with a note like “out of date but still relevant”.
Instead, let’s focus on some fun facts:
[ul]
[li]The folder where the documentation says adobe CC installs extensions doesn’t exist. Neither does the parent folder!
[/li][li]And the folder name is different in other docs. But that’s ok because that one doesn’t exist either.
[/li][li]The introductory documentation encourage you to download and use an eclipse plugin to develop extensions. Except for the other documentation, which says that’s obsolete and doesn’t work with the current version
[/li][li]Of course, all the docs are PDF files, which makes it easy to follow links to “The adobe extension SDK” doc and get different versions of the same document.
[/li][li] And, of course, all the code sample have hard coded version numbers that refer to Adobe’s internal product codes – so you have dig those up if you want to make your extensions work with the version of Photoshop you have. So you get the power of javascript plus the easy distribution of compiled binary plugins!
[/li][li]
[/li][/ul]
I’ve been told that the big Adobe office in Seattle does Premiere or something, not photoshop. If not I’d be tempted to TP the whole place. They’ve made me appreciate Autodesk in ways I never thought possible!