omino pixel blog

This blog usually isn’t for industry commentary and such, but you know, when Adobe starts moving the pixels around in new ways I do get excited.

Adobe’s “Pixel Bender” framework — which facilitates fast, cross-platform, single-frame image-processing filters — will be available in Flash and After Effects, and presumably other imaging apps as well. (It should be useful in Photoshop and Illustrator and Premiere.)

Adobe developer Tinic Uro reveals some important differences between Flash 10’s support, and After Effects’.

In particular, on Flash, a Pixel Bender filter runs on the host CPU, not the graphics card! But not to worry, they’re still mighty fast; they’re compiled to native Intel code on the fly. Ah, right, yes, they’ll be slooow on PPC Macintoshes. So it goes.

On After Effects, however, they’ll run on the GPU.

Couple of relevant links:

Adobe Flash 10 beta download
Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit download
Mr Doob, some guy with a lot of cool Pixel Bender examples (found via AEPortal, thanks!)
Pixelero’s cool examples, too (also via aeportal)

ExtendScript

My favorite Adobe applications are all scriptable. They use a scripting language called ExtendScript. I think it’s pure and compliant JavaScript (aka EcmaScript)… if it has any deviations, it’s in some subtle fashion that hasn’t affected me.

One thing you frequently need in a script is a means to gather input choices, so the script can be flexible. I rolled something up that handles this for many simple situations. I call it the Omino Dialog Maker. It’s a software library that lets you bring up an input dialog with just a couple of lines of code. It is mostly about 2 years old now, works pretty well.

Omino Dialog Maker

Here’s a simple example of a dialog made with the Omino Dialog Maker.

And here’s the code to produce it:

#include "ominoDialogMaker.jsx"

var omd = newOminoDialog("Example Omino Dialog");

omd.number("a number","n",88.21);
omd.string("a string","s","your name here");
var result = omd.run();

if(result == null)
	alert("Cancelled\nYou clicked \"cancel\".");
else
	alert("n is " + result.n + ", and s is \"" + result.s + "\"");

That’s pretty handy, isn’t it? As you can see, omd.run() populates a result variable with the contents of the dialog.

I admit it: tt’s not the best possible dialog and layout. It’s a little clunky looking. But it gets the job done, lets me type in a few numbers and set meat of the script to work.

More UI Elements

Here’s a dialog which shows the various UI elements supported by Omino Dialogs:

And, here’s the code which produced it:

#include "ominoDialogMaker.jsx"
function go()
{
	// setting up a dialog is easy. you can add entries for basic types of
	// string and number, and checkbox and radio buttons, and the
	// dialog is presented reasonably, with very little work.

	var omd = newOminoDialog("Example Omino Dialog");

	omd.boxedText(5,"This is an example of an Omino Dialog. It runs \n"
		+ "with After Effects, Illustrator, and Photoshop, or just in the\n"
		+ "ExtendScript toolkit itself. It can handle simple parameter types."
		+ " (Running in " + app.name + " v" + app.version + ")"
	);
	omd.number("a number","n",15.7);
	omd.string("a string","s","a text value");
	omd.separator();
	omd.sectionLabel("basics");
	omd.checkbox("a checkbox","x",true,"subtitle");
	omd.menu("a menu","menu","cherries",["apples","bananas","cherries","dates","figs"]);
	omd.radioButtons("Choose One","r","red",["red","maroon","scarlet","crimson"]);
	omd.separator();
	omd.sectionLabel("files");
	omd.openFile("a file","jpgFileName","foo.jpg","Choose a JPEG File",".jpg");
	omd.selectFolder("a folder","folderName","/tmp","Choose a folder");
	omd.saveFile("save as","gifFileName","foo.gif","Save as GIF",".gif");s

	// when we "run" the dialog, we get back a result variable.
	// if you hit CANCEL, then the result is null.
	// if you hit OK, then the values are populated into the result.

	// note: you can kill photoshop by running the dialog from ExtendScript toolkit, then halting
	// the script with the dialog still up.

	var result = omd.run();

	if(result == null)
		alert("Cancelled\nYou clicked \"cancel\".");
	else
	{
		var s = "result from dialog:\n";
		for(var f in result)
			s += "   " + f + " := " + result[f] + "\n";
		alert(s);
	}
}
go();

If you’ve read this far, you’re hopefully asking, “Gee, where can I get the actual library?” Here’s the code, shown directly out of my source code repository. Download with the download button.

Trivia: UI Differences Across Adobe Applications

Omino Dialog Maker can be used for scripts in After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator, at least, and possibly other Adobe applications. I have noticed that the dialogs look slightly different in each of these apps! Not critically… For reference, here are screen shots from several.