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Including AppleScript Functionality in Apps


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How many of you would be interested in including AppleScript functionality for Batch processing in Photo, Basic Template Creation is Designer and automated Catalogue/Book Creation in Publisher?

 

The key is to automate repetitive tasks and let you focus more on the finer details on creative work? 

 

I am a bit of an AppleScript fanatic and like to automate certain things to free up my mind for the refining process of creative work.

 

Adobe used to have AppleScript functionality built-in to their design apps (Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign) before, but now I am not so sure since they went and made Creative Cloud (I don't like subscription software). 

 

The intention of this proposed feature is only to automate the basic repetitive tasks for batch work and creating ready-made template designs in fewer steps and free up the creative mind for higher level work such as refinement of a project; in a smaller phrase to be more efficient with your time.

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

IMHO; Adding AppleScript capabilities would truly be a great asset & allow users to eventually automate task for entire workflows.  Even better to have AppleScripts communicate across the entire Affinity Suite (use it to automatically create a photo collage in AP--then apply preset vector graphics or type fx in AD--then combine the layouts in APub with variable data).  I can totally visualize what a huge time saving feature this could be, and best of all Apple hasn't abandoned AppleScript for developers.

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  • 3 weeks later...

aye, python scripting support would be an awesome extension to the Affinity suite.

 

to be honest, I had forgot to check this before firing off a purchase for Photo & Designer and it's going to make transition of my workflows from Gimp & Inkscape a little more time consuming. forgot even to check for command line control of the apps.

 

whupsee.

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  • 1 month later...

+1 for Applescript (& Automator) support!

 

Python & other scripting language support would be nice, but Applescript has the advantage of allowing numerous applications to work together through the inter-application communication framework built into OS X.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • 4 weeks later...

I would also like to add my voice in favor of scripting support.  My personal preference would very very strongly lean towards Python simply because it is a properly robust and feature filled programming language (vs. applescript which has some of the most confusing syntax I have ever used), but I would grudgingly accept just about any language.  I suppose you could use Javascript in an effort to have some limited crossover with Adobe's software, but I doubt there would be enough reusability there to make it worth it.  Maybe Swift (you gain some serious performance as well as relatively modern syntax there)?

 

Ultimately, though, being able to write custom tools within Photo would make it an enormously useful tool in our pipeline.

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Heck, I'd be happy with just a replay facility that would allow me to set up a particular type of manipulation (edit, build, add, delete - the works) and then run it over a set of images, even just to watermark them.  I could probably cook up something basic with Image/GraphicsMagick, but I personally prefer to stick with as few tools as possible.

 

So +1 from me, even just a macro record/replay facility would be awesome.  Correction, more awesome :)

Regards, Binc

 

Warning: dark, twisted sense of humour.  Do not feed after midnight.

Wheat and BS intolerant.  Only use genuine Guinness to lubricate.

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  • 2 weeks later...

+10 for a scripting language that would allow the creation of new commands/tools, not just batch processing ;)

 

As a Photoshop panels/script developer myself, I'm *eager* to see Affinity showing interest into this kind of extensibility.

 

Latest OSX and latest PS combined have proved to be a pain in the neck in some production environments (talked about that very recently with a colleague of mine who is consulting for a large printing company), and we start hearing some feedbacks about the speed and performances of Affinity Photo.

Alas, unless at least some basic scriptability isn't in the features set, we're out of luck.

 

Back in the pre-release days, I know that scripting has been discussed (and still wasn't top priority) - it would be nice to know from somebody in Affinity whether it's possible to expect that coming in the next couple of major versions or not at all.

 

It would be a crucial bit of information for professionals who are taking into consideration a switch in the mid or long term, at least on some production environments.

(clearly it's too early to discuss *what* kind of extensibility - language, features, etc - even if I'd personally vote for JS)

 

Thank you in advance!

 

Davide Barranca

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Thank you for all your responses. Please share this around to get more eyeballs on the diea. The biggest advantage AppleScript has, especially for those new to scripting (like me) would better understand the english language structure instead of traditional scripting languages like python.

 

I checked Adobe and they still have applescript scripting capability in the new cloud editions of their software and has created several guides for doing so. However, I would love to see Applescript be used extensively throughout the Affinity Suite like adobe has with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

 

Automation is going to be a big key for me because I want to use the Affinity Suite for professional uses and to free up time with less labor intesive tasks such running my businesses.

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Applescript is nice, I agree. But not as powerful as javascript or python.
If Affinity could manage to allow the Applescript to create new elements inside a document and to manipulate the ones already inside a document, that would be fine.

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Among others, Applescript includes 'verbs' for do javascript and do shell script, so while the syntax can get tricky (especially for shell scripts!) it can leverage the power of several other script languages. It is designed for inter-application communication so for example with suitable Applescript support in Affinity you could use it together with GraphicConverter to create some very powerful automated workflows.

 

Since OS X includes an application aware Applescript menu bar item, with suitable Applescript support in Affinity you could access Applescripts & scripts compiled as apps very easily from within Affinity. With relatively little extra coding, the developers could also include Automator support, making some automated workflows easy to create even for those with very little scripting experience.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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So I see there is some interest in scripting Affinity Apps. However, what workflows would you like to automate for each Affinity App? Or between affinity apps? Small single app automation or multi-app automation script processes.

 

For example Adobe has workflows between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. One example is creating a catalogue in InDesign with assets created in either/both photoshop and illustrator using Applescript (or Javascript).

 

What are the most significant workflows you would like to automate? Multi-app and single-app?

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Applescript support in all the Affinity apps would inherently be "multi-app," & allow automated workflows that include any of the many other apps made by other software companies that include Applescript support.

 

For instance, with a standard AS text "suite" styled text could be passed between Affinity apps & any of several very powerful word processors for formatting, documentation, or other purposes. Appropriate AS support for layer objects means they could be passed between Affinity & other apps like GraphicsConverter & a few others to do things like make animated GIFs or automatically create & export snapshots for other purposes.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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So I see there is some interest in scripting Affinity Apps. However, what workflows would you like to automate for each Affinity App? Or between affinity apps? Small single app automation or multi-app automation script processes.

 

For example Adobe has workflows between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. One example is creating a catalogue in InDesign with assets created in either/both photoshop and illustrator using Applescript (or Javascript).

 

What are the most significant workflows you would like to automate? Multi-app and single-app?

 

I suspect that our workflow is a fair bit different than many others here.  We mostly do 3D animation and would use Affinity Photo to generate maps for 3D assets as well as projected matte painting style imagery that gets rendered in Renderman or Nuke.

 

So for us one possible use of scripting would involve separating out layers based on a bunch of different and dynamic inputs and generating new images from them.  For example, on a multi-layer image we might want to select entire grouped layers based on name, duplicate them and apply different filters and color work to create black and white, gamma'ed versions.  In many cases we would like to also extract their transparencies and convert those to alpha channels while un-premultiplying the color channel, and then saving the images to different locations on the network based on the name of the groups in question.

 

A separate use case is tying the tool into our asset management system and show environments so that the file open and close dialogs can be replaced with ones that know about our directory structures and automatically save files with the correct naming conventions, versioning, and even automatically publishing images back to our database when an artist is done.

 

There are tons of workflows that we would love to be able to apply (many of which we have already written for other tools using python which is why my personal preference is that language - we have a ready set of libraries that do much of the heavy lifting already - but I understand that that may be unique to us).

 

That is a sample of what would be our use cases.  That said, we haven't bothered to do all of that in Photoshop in part because we are simply too busy to do that on top of all the other applications we are customizing so, well, there's that. :)  The only thing we managed to do were the custom open and close dialogs which worked for a while until PS changed some of their libraries from one version to the next and we never bothered fixing our scripts to match.  Sigh.

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I think this is very unlikely now, given the recent windows announcement. I've been I'm discussions before and had always felt that applescript would have always been a bad decision for extending affinity. Lua, python or javascript would be wiser (my preference has an always will be python, for the record)

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I'm not sure what to make of the Windows announcement -- "feature parity' across both platforms is one of the things that made Photoshop (originally a Mac OS only app back in the old days) such a bloated monster that requires enormous system resources to run at reasonable speeds & allowed Adobe to leverage all the proprietary de facto "standards" they built into it to dominate the industry.

 

In fact, Adobe built its own PS scripting 'toolkit' that among other things relied on Java (not Javascript) to facilitate cross platform parity, & that has not worked out very well for either one.

 

Personally, I would like to see Affinity for each OS leverage that OS's strengths, & not worry overmuch about cross-platform parity.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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InDesign's scripting model would be a good one to emulate --- there's a core scripting engine, which allows one to use three different languages:

 

 - Applescript on Mac OS X

 - VBScript on Windows

 - JavaScript cross-platform on either

 

Lua or Python as platform-independent options would be nice, but it would be good to have AppleScript support, or at least afford a way for AppleScript to call whatever scripting language is used to control Affinity Designer on the Mac --- similarly on Windows, it would be great to allow Powershell or VBScript to be able to engage scripts.

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To each one's own. I wouldn't mind learning python, but in my case AppleScript would be more useful for workflows.

Or if python were made into a defacto scripting language on apple for most apps then I would choose it.

 

I guess it depends on the workflow and apps involved. Any one else?

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Oh I wish python replaced applescript. You can achieve an awful lot with python in OS X. It's also many times more popular. I do like some of the things that can be done easily with applescript, but try and get some community support...forget about it. Every time I've tried something ambitious in applescript, I've ended up scrapping it and doing it in python.

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