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I bag on Adobe a lot. They earn it a lot.

However, I think that with that ability to bag comes a responsibility to commend what that too is earned, and in this case, the Photoshop team has earned a huge "Thank you" from me. Why you ask? For this page on the Adobe Developer Connection. Not only do they have an awesome AppleScript reference that both explains, completely, the individual parts of Photoshop's huge AppleScript dictionary, along with sample code, (SAMPLE CODE! I weep with joy!), but they have a scripting guide that talks about the non-dictionary aspects of things, even talking about the difference between the UI and the dictionary. For example:

A collection of Art Layer objects. Group is the current name in the Photoshop UI. Layer Set was the name used in an earlier version of Photoshop. The Object name stays the same to keep backward compatibility

But it gets better. Not only do they talk about AppleScript, but they talk about VBScript and JavaScript. In other words, they aren't second-classing anyone. This is the kind of work a dev needs to do to really get scripters to use the hell out of their application. It's not enough to just drop it in. Scripting isn't just a fucking file format, it's an API for chrissakes! Yet the average application gives you a dictionary or an object model and expects you to figure out the rest.

By taking this time to document Photoshop's API, my ability to do really awesome things with Photoshop for work and hobby has gone straight up, and my opinion of the application has risen similarly.

So good on you Photoshop team!

And to everyone else? This is how you fucking do it right.

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