Is it possible to open a GWD banner from the Finder window / terminal (osx) instead of through the app?

[ross....@fishawack.com]

I've created some banners using Google Web Designer and I'm able to open the files from the app, however, if I try and open the files from the Finder I get the error:

The document “name.html” could not be opened. Google Web Designer cannot open files in the “HTML text” format.

Is there a way to open open the files from Finder or will I always have to do it through the app?

Also, are there any CLI/Terminal utilities for GWD for things like:
- Launching the app
- Creating new files
- Local publishing of a banner
etc.?

[San Khong]

Hi Ross,

Only the first item, launching the app is possible in Terminal. 

We have discussed opening the file in Finder before. The problem is .html cannot be registered for Google Web Designer because in other cases, people likely want to open it in the browser. So we have discussed internally to give the Google Web Designer author file a file extension such as .gwd that we can register. You will need to publish the file anyway to get all the animation runtime and prefixes so it is not a bad idea to use a different file extension for author file. What do you think of that?

Publishing a banner in Terminal has come up as a feature request before but it's not in our roadmap at the moment.

Thanks,

San

Google Web Designer team

[ross....@fishawack.com]

Thanks for the reply, San.

I understand not making it the default behaviour to open .html files with GWD, however, wouldn't that be down to the user preferences with Finder (right click > open with > other > [select] always open with). With other apps e.g. Phpstorm you're still able to have it open .html files, however, it isn't the default behaviour for finder to open them with Phpstorm.

I also understand not allowing html files that haven't been created by GWD to be opened in GWD, however, it just struck me as a bit odd that if I select to open the file from finder it will give me an error but if open the same file from GWD it works absolutely fine. One of the reasons I was thinking about this is because at the minute it doesn't seem like there's a way to open more than one banner at the same time through GWD.

I do like the idea of .gwd file though.

As for the publishing question, are there any scripts or Grunt/Gulp/Webpack tasks/plugins available that could be used with the same functionality as the local publish feature so that people can automate their process?

Thanks,
Ross

[San Khong]

Hi Ross,

I will discuss this with our engineer again regarding opening files in Google Web Designer from Finder.

There is no way to have headless publishing now without us providing some support for it. I will bring this up to our product manager.

[Steve dell]

I think I like the idea of having a separate extension for source files!

[San Khong]

Thank you Steve for letting us know.