Can we know whether PS is idle?

[poortip87]

Hi All,

I am developing a plugin for PS CS5 and above and I wanted to know if there is any way through which we can know whether Photoshop is idle? By idle I mean can we know if Photoshop is not performing any processing/actions at any given point of time?

Thanks!

[ilvar]

idle even is your best friend here: when you received it you can be sure PS is indeed idle. Just register a notifier on it (sPSActionControl->AddNotify(GetPluginRef(), CPSActionControl::StringIDToTypeID(kidleStr), yourHandler, 0) and you will start receiving them en masse when PS has nothing to do.

NB: Adobe folks warned us not to do anything particularly heavy (e.g. showing GUI) directly on idle as it may cause all sorts of weird things to happen. Just FYI.

[poortip87]

Hi

We don't want any notification from ps whenever its idle. We just want to check photoshop's status whether its busy or idle before hitting some job in it.

Do we have any method available for this??

[ilvar]

I'm unaware of any such function (which of course doesn't mean it doesn't exist somewhere ), but having an idle event it should be easy to perform your job when PS has nothing else to do by simply scheduling your plugin to be triggered on the next idle.