Adobe Labs: PatchPanel

Adobe has unveiled a lot of new programs so far this year. Hyder had a great article on Flash Catalyst last week that pointed to the ability to create Flash apps without code. I did something on CoCoMo a couple weeks ago enabling the quick and easy creation of social apps. This is why is doesn’t surpise me that with rapid influx of fairly dissimilar technologies, including new projects such as Gumbo and Stratus, PatchPanel has flown under the radar until now.

PatchPanel is a Flex extension that allows you to use your Actionscript skills to design extensions for other Adobe products. You could for example use it to draw a grid in Photoshop, or you could create concentric circles in Illustrator, or you could apply PixelBender filters to an image embedded in InDesign. How far can it go? Adobe’s not saying exactly but I would love to be able use Actionscript with comps in AfterEffects.

At it’s base PatchPanel is extending the existing DOM elements to Flash allowing you to access the pre-existing extension modules for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Patch Panel is still in pre-release (it hasn’t graduated to beta yet) but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were to be a marketplace that hosts Flash extensions for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign very shortly.

PatchPanel is Adobe’s “working title” so I thought it would be fun to come up with some names of what this technology should be called. My first thoughts were Photoshop Empire Extender Kit (PEEK) or Photoshop Fabu (compliments of my beautiful wife). What would you call it?