Adobe ExtendScript File object gotcha under OS X Lion
The File object behaves differently in ExtendScript under OS X Lion.
File this under Ultra-Niche. If you happen to be one of the three people in the world using Adobe's easy-to-use and powerful ExtendScript to script the CS*-series of tools (e.g., Photoshop) and you're using the FIle object to write out files manually, read on.
Under Snow Leopard, the following code would work (you'll find variants of this code floating around the Internets):
Well it took me three years to recover from organizing the world's first fully-virtual web conference, <head> with over 70 amazing speakers, in-world conference hubs in the UK, US, Switzerland, Belgium, and Second Life, and several thousand attendees. And by recover, I mean to forget what a huge undertaking it is to organize a conference.
But the time is perfect for a mobile conference in Brighton, and so I give you the Update conference: the human touch – iOS and beyond.
The error: "uncaught exception: [Exception... "Not enough arguments" nsresult: "0x80570001 (NS_ERROR_XPC_NOT_ENOUGH_ARGS)" location: "JS frame"
The cause: Not providing the supposedly-optional-but-not-always-optional-for-every-browser-third-argument to the addEventListener method in JavaScript.
Optinal arguments that aren’t really optional (or thank-you, again, FireFox)
Browsers! *mumble, grumble*
In the initial version of the upcoming Update conference web site, I'm optimizing for desktop, iPad, and iPhone-tier phones. This means that I have to create five different versions of nearly every image. One for the desktop size, one for 320px wide screens, one for 480px wide screens, and two for the Retina (@2X) resolutions. Of course, saving all those images by hand would suck. And it's not enough just to resize the images and export them for web since, when resized, I need to unsharp mask them to make sure they're not blurry.
I initially thought I could record an action to do this, but the Photoshop file I have for the graphics has dozens of layers. I thought I could use the Layer comps to files… script that ships with Photoshop but – while it let me export layer comps to files – it wouldn't let me add custom actions in the middle of the process (in this case to unsharp mask the image once it was resized).
Multi-resolution images, Photoshop, and ExtendScript
Using ExtendScript and Photoshop to make it easier to build multi-resolution images for web sites.
Take your favorite content slider and try this: on a Mac notebook, two-finger scroll. I'll bet my hat (easy to do when you don't wear hats) that the component will go nuts. For one thing, it will most likely be mapping your vertical scroll gesture to a horizontal scroll. I don't know who first decided that was a good idea but I think we can safely agree that it doesn't make any sense. And every content slider out there that I've encountered does this! So much so that I actually thought that you simply couldn't get horizontal scroll information from the "mousewheel".
Scrolling in a whole other dimension
A horizontal scroll isn't a vertical scroll by any other name… or something like that.