Old Photoshop scripts and Apple Silicon

[jackdaw_1066]

Hi

I have a series of scripts for my workflow which were developed a few years ago. I use a Mac and want to upgrade to the new Mac Studio. Will my jsx scripts that make use of scriptUI work on the native version of Photohop on Apple Silicon? I'm aware my CEP panel will not work but have re-written it to work with UXP. However, the functionality isn't availible under UXP to re-write all the scripts yet.

Thanks

[jefbr]

Sounds like you need one of the UXP scripting gods...

I don't know them all, but I dare say that these two lovely gentlemen could potentially offer a good insight: @Kukurykus , @DavideBarranca 

[Kukurykus]

I neither use macOS nor UXP.

[jefbr]

My bad, apologies. Who am I confusing you with then? Didn't you make the alchemist plugin? 

[PECourtejoie]

Jaroslav Bereza wrote it. Pinging @Jarda Bereza 

[Kukurykus]

Our countries are neighbours - I'm from Poland, he's from Czech Republic 🙂

[jefbr]

Oh cool, off topic but I studied In Brno, Masarykova univerzita. ❤️ One of the best periods of my life.

[Kukurykus]

So you have more common with him than me. It seems he lives/d & works/ed in Brno.

[PECourtejoie]

Hi ! Until there is a solution, the workaround might be to run Photoshop in Rosetta mode on an M1 mac. I believe then CEP would work.

[Davide_Barranca · Accepted solution]

For the time being the ExtendScript engine is kept side by side with the new one (modern JS, so to speak), so you should be able to fire your ScriptUI-based dialogs just fine.

It's a bit of a mess to keep track of, I know, but CEP isn't working in native M1 systems (unless run via Rosetta2 in Intel emulation), but JSX itself (File > Scripts > Browse...) does work. For how long, that's a question I cannot give an answer though.

At some point X in the future, you'll have to rewrite your scripts with the modern engine. It's been announced that "pure scripts"—i.e. scripting code that doesn't need to be wrapped by UXP plugins, with interfaces etc.—will be available in the near future. At the moment, if you want to use the new DOM, you must work within the context of a UXP plugin (which you might not even need).

If you need User Interfaces, then you'll have to deal with UXP plugins.

TL;DR

M1 native: no CEP, JSX/ScriptUI is fine (not indefinitely, though)

I hope this helps!

Best,

Davide

www.davidebarranca.com

www.ps-scripting.com

[Kukurykus]

"It's been announced that "pure scripts"—i.e. scripting code that doesn't need to be wrapped by UXP plugins, with interfaces etc.—will be available in the near future."

Do you mean 'old' extendscript we could use without CEP or UXP won't be withdrawn?

Oh by the way as you didn't visit us for long you probably don't know the links in posts foots are now disallowed, but maybe there's some exception if they promote tools to use with apps, so like yours 😉

[Davide_Barranca]

Hi Kukurykus,

the old ExtendScript engine will definitely be deprecated/removed sometime in the future—so in the end it'll be just the modern JS engine, either alone or within a UXP plugin's context.

My understanding (but take this with a pinch of salt) is that CEP will go sooner—I mean, it's already gone in M1/native—and JSX will be kept longer for compatibility purposes.

Thanks for mentioning the banned link thing, I didn't know—to be on the safe side I won't add them.

Best,

Davide

[PECourtejoie]

Thank you, Davide!

[jackdaw_1066]

Thats great Davide, thanks for the answer, i've re-writen my CEP panel in UXP but i'm doing the unthinkable and lanching my jsx scripts with scriptUI interfaces from a UXP panel. I don't have the skills to re-write the jsx scripts. I hope they keep support for jsx and scriptUI in there for a long time to come. I'm fearful they will not though as you say.

[Davide_Barranca]

Yup, luckily there's some degree of hybridisation you can put in place (e.g. script the loading of a JSX that in turn lanches the ScriptUI dialogs, which I guess is what you're doing) while you wait for events to unfold in Adobe-land 😉 

If you've already converted your CEP extension to a UXP plugin it shouldn't be an awful lot of work to take care of the ScriptUI dialogs (that you'll deal with as modal dialogs in UXP), unless they've a lot of UI and especially logic in them, in which case I reckon it'd be tricky.

Please note that the timeline of the old to new dev environments depends on the host application's team; it's up to them to decide if/when to pull the plug, so you might see different strategies in place (e.g. the PS team will differ from the ID or AE/PPRO teams).