SJ wrote:
It has been months since any new Exchange plugins have been added. I have to wonder why. Can you give me an answer?
I’ve been wondering the same thing myself, for a long time. Adobe had a somewhat vibrant store of cool plug-ins, scripts, and other materials on their Adobe Exchange site for a couple of years. Then, it all stopped around the end of 2006. Steve Werner noticed that a new “beta” site went live last May, but there was no new content added for half a year. It was like posting a brand new ghost town.
Then, suddenly, at the end of 2007, someone woke up, posted a couple dozen new items that developers had uploaded… and then fell asleep again. As I type this, there has been nothing new since 10 December.
Why? Does InDesign Exchange Beta mean “we have a high school student intern running this thing”? I don’t mean to be mean, but come on… Adobe has teased us long enough. I think they need to get that ball rolling and make it a real resource, or put it out of its misery (and ours).
I wish we had the resources to build a real InDesign “exchange” here at InDesignSecrets — with uploads, ratings, and so on — but honestly, we’re working on a shoestring here and we can’t build that kind of content management system. Adobe is perfectly situated to host it, but again, it doesn’t help anyone if it can’t be maintained properly. I even heard an Adobe employee at last week’s InDesign Conference say that it was hardly worth looking at these days, because a lot of the material there is out of date.
That said, there are some pretty cool items on the Exchange that are useful. For example, someone at the conference was asking about a way to turn footnotes to endnotes… a quick glance at the Exchange shows a script to do just that. I haven’t used it, so I’m not sure how good it is. But it’s worth glancing through the stuff that is there, just in case.
There are a few other similar resource sites out there, but nothing else that I’ve seen that would be a true replacement. Any suggestions from readers? (Or, anyone who wants to build us a system for real cheap?! ;) )
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on March 5, 2008
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