Test Version of My Illustrator to XAML Plug-In for the Mac

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One of the most frequent questions I get related to my Adobe Illustrator to XAML Export Plug-In is: “does it run on a Mac?” Unfortunately, the answer has always been “no,” because I’ve never owned a Mac, and I’ve never done any Mac development…ever. If you can believe it, the last Apple computer I wrote code for was the Apple IIe. Those were the days!

Last week, I asked around the office, and between Tim Sneath and Thomas Lewis, I was able to borrow a Mac Mini to play around with (thanks, guys!). I installed OS X Tiger and Xcode 2.5, because I wanted to target the Illustrator CS3 SDK (which recommends that OS/tool combination). I would have gone back a bit further, but the CS and CS2 SDKs are both based on CodeWarrior, and I didn’t want to make my situation any more difficult by using even older versions of the OS and tools. Because of this choice, the plug-in should work fine with Illustrator CS3 and CS4, though I’ve only been able to test it on CS4 myself.

Fortunately, when I wrote the original plug-in for the PC version of Illustrator, I mostly stuck to the platform agnostic functionality and types that are exposed by the SDK. This made it much easier to port the code to the Mac. Here are the three biggest challenges I encountered:

  • General unfamiliarity with the Mac – since I haven’t used a Mac since the Mac Classic (before it was even called “Classic”), just finding my way around the system felt like I was exploring an alien planet. Where did my Illustrator window go!?!?
  • Xcode – being unfamiliar with the Mac didn’t make it any easier to understand the project system or the Xcode developer tools. And Carbon? What’s that? :-)
  • Platform-specific code – if you’ve used the PC version of the plug-in, you know that you can hold down the left shift key during export to pop-up your default XAML viewer; if you hold down the right shift key, your WPF export uses DrawingBrush syntax. The Mac API that I found doesn’t allow me to distinguish between the left and right shift keys, so the Mac version exports DrawingBrush syntax regardless of which Shift key is held down.

If you’d like to help test, download Mac version 0.18 (see update below) and copy the XAMLExport.aip file to your Illustrator plug-in folder. Like the most recent PC version, you’ll find "XAML for Silverlight (*.XAML)" and "XAML for WPF (*.XAML)" as new formats under File/Export. I’ve run many files from my test suite through the plug-in and have so far been able to add all of them successfully to Expression Blend 2 on my PC.

It may help to read through the Features list on my plug-in page to see what works and what doesn’t. Also, I’d love it if someone could test it with Illustrator CS, CS2, and CS3 and report their results…I only have CS4 on the Mac.

Thanks in advance for your help and feedback!

Update: A newer version of the plug-in is now available, including version 0.19 for both the PC and the Mac.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 08, 2009
    PingBack from http://www.clickandsolve.com/?p=4968

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2009
    Attention Designers!  Mike Swanson has released a Test Version of his Illustrator to XAML Plug-In

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2009
    Es war ein langer Tag und deswegen mache ich es kurz, aber das ist zu gut um bis morgen zu warten: Mike

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2009
    a test version of a Mac-compatible plugin for Illustrator to Silverlight is now available!

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2009
    digg_url = "http://blogs.msdn.com/chkoenig/archive/2009/02/09/illustrator-to-xaml-plug-in-for-the

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2009
    お、とうとうこういったものが出てきました。 デザインをやる方は圧倒的に Adobe Illustrator や Photoshop を使っている方が多いです。特にUIデザインで Illustrator

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2009
    Illustrator to XAML Plug-In for MAC

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2009
    Pokud vás jako designéra zaujalo WPF nebo Silverlight , tak jste se už určitě setkali se XAML em. A jestli

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2009
    Hi Mike, felix here (the one who showered your plugin with praise on the hanselman podcast!) Anyway this is fantastic news - I'll give it a go on CS3 & CS4 on my mac at home tonight. Thanks again for this invaluable plugin - I must have used it 20 times today exporting glyphs! Cheers felix PS maybe next microsoft will build a silverlight authoring app for the mac... ;)

  • Anonymous
    February 11, 2009
    Thank you for submitting this cool story - Trackback from DotNetShoutout

  • Anonymous
    February 13, 2009
    Events Mix09 WPF Workshop: Jaime/Robby/John/… “ Hiking Mt. Avalon at Mix09 ”. Sounds great. WPF Jaime

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2009
    I cannot remember...  Where is the Illustrator plug-in folder in Mac OS X?

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2009
    Wow! I can hardly believe that this is the third post on my Illustrator to XAML plug-in in the past month.

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2009
    @Edward: it's usually somewhere like /Applications/Adobe Illustrator CS4/Plug-ins

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2009
    @mswanson:  Yep, the most obvious place!  I was looking in all of those cryptic, hidden system folders instead.

  • Anonymous
    August 26, 2009
    Do you know of any Mac app where i can see the result of exported XAML  file visually and not just in code (since i'm a designer).

  • Anonymous
    August 26, 2009
    @Flemming: Short of running Windows in an emulator on your Mac, you might want to check out Gestalt from the MIX Online team: http://www.visitmix.com/labs/gestalt/. Since Silverlight runs on a Mac, you can at least view Silverlight XAML.