I am skeptical of ambitious in-house automation scripting projects. The time spent on creating efficiencies is rarely recovered when end-users don’t know when to use them or where to find them. It is hard to justify the expense of coding a sophisticated UI on top of a collection of scripts. “Just show everyone how to do it.”

Examples I have seen actually used were purchased. They acted like a stand-alone application or a first-class plug-in to an application (think Photoshop). Successful commercial examples also have another important characteristic: they balance the competing goals of simplifying a complex process with providing enough control to be useful to a broad set of potential users.

Recently I was asked to research a scripting solution for a documentation/page composition process. If you are happy to play in the Adobe sandbox there are some compelling possibilities for building a GUI-driven scripted automation solution.

Adobe provides some nice examples and tools that can be assembled into a loose framework for creating the scripts and the GUI components and packaging them in an installer. Because it is based on AIR, it all can be made to work on both PC and MAC, a big plus in publishing.

It wasn’t easy to find everything at Adobe, and there was a ton of filtering and detail required to assemble a working framework. I will follow this post with more details on what I found and how I set it up for a demo.

Launch Switchboard Demo

Software used:

Adobe Flex 3
Adobe Indesign CS3 & 4
Adobe ExtendScript CS4
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended
Adobe Switchboard &
Adobe Switchboard SDK
SB_IntegrateESwithSB (Flex project demo)
Adobe AIR (I think this now comes with Flash Player 10)