MikeSalisbury

It occurs to me that there's an opportunity here to appeal to Serif's apparent revenue model. Since the products are so cheap (for now), it may be that Serif is looking to make a platform play, where they develop a large-enough customer base to attract developers to an add-on market. We already see signs of that in their sales of textures, fonts, and brushes. What if they looked to open up these add-ons to other 'tools' as well? I could see access to an object model of the existing capabilities as important to this. e.g. I can imagine, on the low end, a plugin to 'sketchify' existing strokes to make them look hand-drawn, or on the high end, a 3d plugin where you can render a 3d model, possibly as part of a 3d animation package like Blender, in order to generate a 3d still or even a full 3d animation, modeled and animated outside but rendered by Designer or Paint. In any case, a large part of this would be the development of an object model api that they would expose to outside developers. A scripting interface would be an incremental step beyond that that they might consider as a way to better publicize their capabilities to those who might be interested in developing such paid plugins for their store. Anyway, just a thought. -m

Unfortunately, this is a difficult decision for them I'm sure. A scripting environment and object models is a very heavy-weight feature to develop, and there is a huge opportunity cost for Serif to choose this over other features that may appeal to a broader slice of their customer base. At this point it looks like Serif's product strategy is to go after folks who are unhappy with Adobe's pricing model with products that are good enough to replace them. I discovered Serif's products late enough in their development to find them already more than good enough (they are excellent, and better than Adobe's in many ways), but I'm sure that was not always the case. Until they see the scripting opportunity as big enough to grab more market share than adding more missing features, they won't (and shouldn't) bother. That said, I hope they aren't underestimating the market demand for such capabilities. I'd expect that many businesses automate their document production processes quite a bit, and there is likely a hurdle behavior where providing scripting would allow an entire org to adopt Serif products where they can't even consider them now. One sad thing is that this is exactly the kind of feature I develop at work -- user-facing development environments and object models -- and I'd be happy to help or consult on building this feature. But one person from outside the company isn't going to change their product development strategy. At this point the best we can do is to demonstrate and promote the demand for this feature and hope to get Serif to note it. (Note that all of this presumes that they aren't currently working on it. It is a big feature and it will take significant time, so it's possible. But as a previous note said, I would think its development might have leaked by now.)

Mostly what I want from scripting is to be able to treat Designer as a rendering library to build beautiful illustrations. For instance, I use Designer to build a leaderboard for a game league. The leaderboard looks great, but it requires a good bit of work to update week to week. It would be so nice to be able to move elements around and fill ratings in via a data-powered script rather than by hand. I'm imagining something along the lines of Google's Apps Script where the apps expose an object model that represents the document and the components within it, but development of a cross-platform scripting system seems a bit heavyweight. I'd personally be more than happy with a platform-specific interface (e.g. Apple's Scripting Support), since I don't need my scripts to work on Windows.