Adobe Express Add-ons

Recorded Jun 25, 2023

Intro

To kick things off, Kerri gives us an update on Adobe Creative Cloud Partner Days, where Creative Cloud platform developers gather to learn more about in-app and cloud APIs for Creative Cloud.

Kerri also tells Ash about the Star Trek Resurgence game, while Ash is trying to avoid talking about his new Mac Studio.

Adobe Express extensibility

Ash is excited he didn't have to debate what to name Adobe Express extensibility products: add-ons, addons, plug-ins, plugins, scripts, apps, widgets, etc etc. They are called add-ons! Please don't alter our current timeline by calling them something else!

Then our co-hosts do a deep-dive. To start, Kerri gives Ash a recap of what Adobe Express is.

Building on this basic understanding, Kerri and Ash look at what developers can do with the Express Add-on APIs:

• Storage and content I/O
• Icon generation
• Recoloring
• Workflows and automation

Then Kerri and Ash get into the how by talking through the Adobe team's priorities for APIs, which—at recording time in June 2023—were in private beta:

• OAuth
• Drag and drop
• I/O
• Networking

You can get the docs here.

Some early examples of Adobe Express Add-ons that come up:

• Accessibility (A11y): add-ons for color blindness
• Attention Insight: heat map based on AI
• Notion: this add-on doesn't yet! But developers: go build that please! - Love, Ash
• MediaGrab: scrape assets from web pages
• Clipping Mask Pro: now with blobs!
• NFTs: add-ons for managing them
• VisionBoard: mood boarding

Kerri then walks Ash through the end user flow:

1. Make a new blank asset
2. Select add-ons in the left-hand nav
3. Select and add-on and click the “Add” button

All-in-all, our co-hosts, while surely biased, are quite excited about the possibilities Adobe Express extensibility APIs represent.

Obligatory xkcd

Questing for info on a Safari color picker bug: https://xkcd.com/979/