Trying to write a custom XMP File Info panel

This morning I watched 'Me too!' and 'Big Cook, Little Cook' with Ben. In 'Me too!', it was about Dr. Juno. She dropped off her dog at Granny Murray's, and Granny Murray said that some random person who all the characters seemed to know except Dr Juno was having a baby in the hospital today. Granny Murray gave Dr. Juno a paper flower that the children had made so she could wear it to greet the new baby or sumat stupid like that.

When Dr. Juno left, Granny Murray said she'd be thinking of her, and Dr. Juno said she'd also be thinking about herself. All the characters in 'Me too!' say they'll be thinking of themselves, totally self centered.

Also, like all the other characters, Dr Juno didn't know the way to work and said hello to inanimate objects on the way there. At one point she was standing on a street where you could see a road going towards the Hosptial/Gherkin, then later she was on some steps and had forgotten which way to go. Then she ended up back where she was before (or at least somewhere that looked very similar).

When she got to work the nurse bloke talked to her about something, then Bobby came in and her and Dr. Juno were really weird and scared the nurse bloke away. Bobby also had a paper flower from Granny Murray.

After that, it showed Granny Murray, the two kids she was babysitting and the dog going shopping for some baby clothes for the new baby. Raymond was walking along and they saw him just outside the shop they wanted to go on, so they got him to look after the dog while they went in and bought some baby clothes. Weirdly, while they were in the shop a third child joined them.

Then it cut back to Dr Juno at the hospital, and Bobby showed up again and said she'd given her flower to the pregnant woman's husband, and he had gone shopping. Dr Juno sang a song about how she loves her job, and doesn't do any real work, then the nurse bloke popped in and said that the woman was about to give birth, but her husband wasn't there.

Dr Juno didn't know what the husband looked like, except that he must be wearing the paper flower that Bobby gave him, so she decided to start a frantic search for him. First she looked in the hospital, and misappropriated one of the hospital trolleys which she sat on, while the nurse bloke pushed her along. I guess that's standard behaviour at their hospital?

Then she looked in the town, and then in the countryside. I guess she didn't understand that if someone has gone shopping, they're unlikely to be walking about in a field in the countryside. Of course, it probably took her quite a while to get there as well. Then she looked in the hospital again, and found him asleep on a seat. I didn't think that a Doctor's job involved looking for patients' partners rather than looking after the actual patients, but I guess I was wrong.

Granny Murray turned up at the hospital after the birth, with the two children in tow. She said she'd left Dr. Juno's dog outside with Bobby. Then it cut to Granny Murray untying the dog, without the children. When Dr. Juno went back to Granny Murray's, there weren't any children there, so I presume Granny Murray must have left the children at the hospital. Maybe they caught something while they were there, or Dr. Juno ran them over while riding on a trolley?

After watching those programs, I went on Animal Crossing for a bit. Then I went on my comp and installed Lightroom 2.3 to see if I could use it to add custom metadata. It seemed that I couldn't, so I did some googling and eventually found the Lightroom SDK.

After lunch I unpacked the Lightroom SDK and started reading the manual for it. However, it seems that you can't add custom xmp metadata to images, the manual says:

Limitations of custom metadata in this release
In the current implementation, custom metadata defined by a plug-in has these limitations, which will be
addressed in future versions of the Lightroom SDK:
➤ Values stored in custom metadata fields are stored only in Lightroom's database. In the current
release, a plug-in cannot link custom metadata fields to XMP values or save them with the image file.

So I think that probably I will have to use the XMP File Info SDK to make a custom File Info panel for bridge, and the edit the metadata from the File Info dialog, rather than the metadata pane.

Most of the afternoon I spent trying to get Adobe Flex setup so I could make a custom panel. I thought you could get the Flex SDK working with Eclipse, but I think that actually you need a Flex Builder Eclipse plugin, which costs money. There is also an Adobe Flex Builder application, which again you have to pay for.

Eventually I followed the instructions in the Adobe XMP FileInfo SDK Programmer's Guide on how to compile a panel using the Flex SDK, and this seemed to work okay, except that to compile the panel I had to just type ant rather than ant build.xml.

So now I need to work on actually writing the mxml file that is used to compile the panel from. I also checked whether it was possible to write custom tags in exiftool, and it is.

After dinner I carried on trying to get a custom File Info panel to work, I did get one working, but then I changed a lot of stuff in one go and broke it, so I think I'll just start again tomorrow.

Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Golden nuggets; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Pastrami with sweet & crunchy salad sandwich; banana; Rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Battered fish portion; peas; potatoes. Pudding was one of the eccles cakes me and Ben made yesterday, heated up in the oven. Coffee.