In case you’ve missed the news, Adobe has open-sourced the Spectrum CSS – the stylesheets they’re using for Photoshop’s own CEP Panels 🍾 The GitHub repository is found here.

The CSS is demoed in this page, where you can pick four themes (Lighter, Light, Dark, Darkest) in four scales (Medium, Large, Medium diff, Large diff). The component list, compared to Topcoat which I’ve been using extensively in my projects, is quite larger – and frankly perhaps a tad overkill for CEP Panels, e.g. I doubt I would ever use a Calendar. But I’ve never complained of abundance: nice and very welcomed features are all kind of sliders, including ranges, and split-buttons, steppers, etc.

You can read in the documentation page that:

We have found that JavaScript is where a framework or library quickly becomes opinionated and stops being easy to use with or across other frameworks. To avoid this problem, Spectrum CSS avoids implementation details that require JavaScript. Where an element might require multiple states, the documentation here will simply show all the states in a flat, static example. We leave it to the frameworks implementing Spectrum CSS to create JavaScript that suits their needs.

Which means that we’re left on our own, but that’s not a big issue I suppose – hopefully there will be a Vue.js Spectrum components implementation in the near future :-)

The state of the Blog

That was it for Spectrum CSS, I take the chance here now to inform you about blog updates, etc. As a matter of fact, I’ve slowed down things quite a bit as you’ve noticed: I took fewer Panel jobs and tried to focus on books and courses. I’ve had greatly unwelcome issues with my house’s restoration works (started a couple of years ago – both the works and the issues…) that proved to be a time/concentration/money sink. As a result, progress on development-related tasks have been erratic, to say the least. Recently, I try to record a couple of test videos to be bundled with the Professional Photoshop Scripting course, which will look more or less like this:

There is no ETA yet – I will be able to tell you more as soon as I get the estimate for the roofing works, which will be followed by the insulation works, then the stairs, etc. Hopefully, before my hair gets completely gray 😉 Thanks for reading and for your support!