I have a question for those experienced Illustrator plugin developers. What is the most appropriate language to program in, and what compiler is best for making a plugin for Illustrator. With the SDK, is it possible to have access to Illustrator's user interface?
For Windows, you can use any Visual Studio (including the free versions), or Borland (free), Watcom (free), MinGW (free), CodeWarrior and others. My
earlier post has some links. The Adobe sample code is only tested against a recent Visual Studio (and CodeWarrior?), so that is usually the easiest system to get started with.
For Mac, CodeWarrior, MPW (free), and Xcode (free, but builds for CS2 only). Disclaimer: I don't know which of these support symbolic debugging (I don't use it).
Being a Windows developer and never created an Illustrator plugin how hard is it to develope both Mac and PC plugins from the same code set, of course using #ifdef / #endif where need be.
And does anyone have info on using VS 2005 .Net for the Mac plugin creation?
Portable plugins aren't difficult; Adobe's API is crossplatform. As for .NET, the Mac has no runtime for it. Plan to use C/C++, or do what Microsoft hopes, and write for Windows only.
Never found to many problems porting the plugins from PC to Mac, the only issue I have ever had was with file access and the differences in OS (for presets) Other than that, the main source file, plugin.h, plugindlg.h etc files have all just easily slotted into codeWarrior projects, and now XCode.
The only problems have been with the different versions of plug-ins for 10/CS and CS2 and now with CS3 on the mac. Still got a single set of files for the code on the PC and still using Visual Studio 97 to compile and link my illustrator plugins on graphicxtras.com
Been pleased how easy it was to convert to XCode and the intel/ppc CS3 plugins
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