PugetBench for Creators - Puget Systems
Background
As long time fans of their industry-standard benchmarking tools for Premiere Pro, Photoshop and many other apps, we were excited to help Puget Systems take their product PugetBench for Creators to the next level.
The Challenge
As Puget's benchmarks have grown over the years in complexity and for more host applications, the current challenge they were facing was maintaining consistent benchmark tools as separate plugins for each app.
Trying to make updates across these plugins, ensure they stayed in sync, and followed a standardized benchmark processes was far from straightforward.
The Solution
After discussing possible routes forward, the solution we landed on was consolidating the functionality of all these plugins into one unified desktop app for all the app benchmarks.
This would make for a consistent user experience, a standardized benchmark development process, and clear path forward for adding new applications and benchmarks in the future.
The Process
The UI
We set out to redesign the UI giving it a fresh look that felt cohesive with with Puget Systems' brand. While the benchmark tool itself required a large number of options and settings, we found a layout that retained focus on the essentials while retaining access to advanced settings if the user needed them.
The Build System & Packages
Next we outlined a build system for Puget to easily release new benchmarks without requiring users to manually download new versions of the app each time. This build system would create unique modular packages for the tests and the media assets required to run the tests. This gave the client maximum flexibility in benchmark development and provided the users with the fastest experience by only downloading new assets when required by a test to avoid any redundant downloads.
App Integrations
And finally, we got to work constructing the desktop app from the ground up, utilizing minimal background plugins to communicate with each host app. Since Adobe is currently transitioning their extension framework from CEP to UXP, this meant that Photoshop would require a UXP plugin while Premiere Pro would require a CEP extension.
These background plugins would communicate with the host app, receiving instructions on opening projects, running tests, and recording settings and results. This mechanism of having a desktop app interacting with individual headless plugins allowed the desktop app to have full control of each host app, and without being held back by a plugin's UI limitations.
The Result
After extensive rounds of beta testing with Puget Systems and their core clients to ensure a solid public release, Puget Systems went live with the all new PugetBench for Creators. We were excited to be part of the process and see this tool come to life and look forward to its future!
More info can be found on their website, and you can download the tool and get started with benchmarking today here:
Hyper Brew is terrific to work with. We have a number of Adobe-based plugins that have grown in user base over the years, but the code was an absolute mess. Hyper Brew worked with us to take those existing plugins, completely re-build them, add a number of features we had no clue how to implement ourselves, and integrated them into a stand-alone application that interfaced with the Adobe applications.
Great experience, and we already have a number of other projects planned that we will be using them for!