SwitchBoard

Well, some of you will be wondering what SwitchBoard is? Well, in brief it is a way for Adobe AIR applications to communicate with Adobe CS3 apps.

Now is Adobe’s own words:

SwitchBoard brings together the power of the automation in the Creative Suite applications with the potential for third parties to extend the creative process with new applications produced using AIR. The result is an extensible, powerful, cross-platform environment that can quickly adapt to today’s rapidly changing creative workflows.

So, what can you do with SwitchBoard?

SwitchBoard allows you to use features from any Creative Suite application in your own AIR application. So, say if you wanted to convert a .PSD to a .PNG, all you would have to do is use the SwitchBoard SDK to call Photoshop, and once Photoshop has opened, tell it to convert the selected file to a .PNG. Simple huh?

How to use SwitchBoard?

Well, to get started you need to download the Switchboard SDK and Installer from here (http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/SwitchBoard#Installing_SwitchBoard)

Here is a short example, inspired by the getting started:

1
2
3
4

var msg: com.adobe.SwitchBoard.Message = new com.adobe.SwitchBoard.Message();
msg.target = "photoshop";
msg.body = "alert( 'Hello World' );";
msg.send();

What this does is simple send the message ‘alert( ‘Hello World’ )’ to Photoshop.

1. Create a variable called msg, of type Message.
2. Then you tell it which application you want to communicate with. I take it here what you know what were communicating with :) (Photoshop?).
3. Then you input to code you want to execute in your desired app.
4. Finally, it sends to specified code, to the specified application.

There you go, your first app that uses SwitchBoard!

Till next time!
Harry.