What's New

Update the plugin from Adobe Exchange to get the new Sidekick Actions panel. Everything else in this release reaches you automatically.

Introducing Sidekick Actions: Ask Once, Then It’s One Click

This is the biggest addition to Sidekick so far. Until now, Sidekick did a job and was done: the next time you needed the same thing, you asked again. Now it can leave a tool behind.

When Claude (or any other AI assistant) has done something in InDesign you will want again, such as checking a document before it goes to print, just say “Save this as an action.” Sidekick saves it under a name, and from then on it’s yours:

• One click in InDesign. Run it from the new Sidekick Actions panel, without starting a chat, and even when your assistant isn’t running.
• The same result every time. An action is a real script, so it does exactly the same thing on every run, on every document.
• Any assistant. Run it by name in Claude, ChatGPT, Codex or any other assistant you use with Sidekick.
• No scripting. Your assistant writes it; you only describe what you want.

New to actions? Introducing Sidekick Actions walks through saving your first one, with a check before print as the example.

Settings Become a Form

When an action has something you’d want to change per run, such as the smallest font size to check or which pages to look at, Sidekick turns it into a setting. In the panel, each setting is a field: a number, a choice, a checkbox or a piece of text. Fill it in and click Run.

Reports That Take You There

An action ends with a report of what it found. Click a row and InDesign goes straight to the item it names, and the report says where it is: on which page, on a parent page or on the pasteboard.

Check First, Then Apply

An action that fixes things checks first and changes nothing until you tell it to apply. Applied changes are one step in InDesign’s undo, so a single Undo takes them all back.

Four Examples to Start From

Sidekick comes with four actions that show what is possible: finding overset text, images without alt text, rich black on small text, and Dutch typesetting rules. They are examples for you and your assistant to learn from. Hide them with Toggle Built-in Actions in the panel’s menu.

Your Panels Stay Open

InDesign closes the panels of every plugin when it restarts, so the Sidekick panels stayed closed until you opened them from the Plug-ins menu. They now open again by themselves, if they were open when you quit. They come back floating, since InDesign forgets where they were docked.

Saving on Windows With Ransomware Protection

On Windows with Controlled Folder Access switched on, saving an action could hang without an answer. Sidekick now answers right away, and explains how to allow it or choose another folder.

Most of this release needs a quick reinstall. These fixes live in the part of Sidekick that is installed on your computer, which can’t update itself. Download the latest version from the install page and run it; your settings and your Adobe Exchange plugin stay as they are.

No More Waiting on a Stuck Sidekick

Now and then Sidekick could stop responding mid-session: your assistant waited, every InDesign command timed out, and the only way out was to quit and restart the assistant. Sidekick now notices when that happens and recovers by itself, so you can carry on where you were.

An Honest Health Check

When you used Claude with Cowork, asking “sidekick health” could report that InDesign was not connected, even though every command worked fine. That made a working setup look broken, often right at the end of installing it. The health check now reports what actually happens: if your assistant can reach InDesign, it says so.

Your Computer Only

Sidekick now accepts InDesign commands only from the computer it runs on. Other machines on the same network can’t reach it, whatever the network or firewall settings.

Smoother Starts After an Update

On the first start after a new release, Sidekick could fail to start in Claude, until you restarted it. This happened when Claude started Sidekick twice at the same moment, for chat and for Cowork. Both now finish the update cleanly.

Settings That Reach Every Assistant on Windows

On Windows, asking Claude Desktop to “disable Sidekick telemetry” didn’t reach Sidekick when it ran in another assistant, such as Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, and the other way round. A choice you make in one assistant now applies to all of them.

A Guide for Every Assistant

The install page now has a short guide for each AI assistant: Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf) and OpenCode, with the simplest route first. Each guide ends by asking your assistant a question only InDesign can answer, such as how many pages your document has, so you know right away that everything works. There’s also a new help article on getting a receipt or invoice for your subscription.

Easier for Your Assistant to Find

Sidekick now tells your AI assistant more clearly what its tools are for, and when to use them: anything you ask about your InDesign documents, and a quick “sidekick health” when you want to check the connection. Assistants that look through their tools before choosing one now find Sidekick more readily.

A Note on Usage Statistics

Sidekick’s anonymous usage statistics now also record which AI app it runs in, such as Claude, and how it was installed. This tells us which assistants to support better. Nothing else changes: no names, no documents, and nothing that links one session to the next. The privacy policy has the details, and you can still switch statistics off at any time by asking your assistant to “disable Sidekick telemetry”.

Lighter Snapshots in the Conversation

When Claude shows you a snapshot right in the conversation, it used to send the picture twice: once as the image, and once more as a long run of hidden text. In some AI assistants that added tens of thousands of tokens per snapshot, filling up the conversation fast. In Claude’s new cloud-based Cowork sessions the response grew too large and was cut short.

The picture now travels once. Snapshots look exactly the same, the inline preview in Claude Desktop is unchanged, and long sessions with many snapshots stay light.

Object Snapshots on Every Spread

Taking a snapshot of a single frame, image or group now works wherever it sits. Objects on a later spread used to be pictured from the same spot on the first spread, and anchored objects (placed inside a text frame) could be cropped from the wrong part of the page. Both now come out right, with the correct list of what overlaps them.

More Fonts Measured

Claude can now measure fonts it used to miss: the families that come as font collections on the Mac, such as Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Avenir Next and Menlo, and the fonts that ship with InDesign itself, such as Minion Pro and Myriad Pro, on both Mac and Windows. Asking for a specific style, like Helvetica Bold, returns that style. When a font really can’t be found, the message now says where Sidekick looked.

Ready From the First Moment

On a brand-new install, Sidekick could come up without any of its InDesign abilities if it was restarted before its first download had finished. It now has everything it needs from the very first moment, and switches to the newest version as soon as that arrives. If this happened to you, reinstall once from the install page.

New Help Articles

• Sidekick shows as Acquired, but the plugin is missing: what to do when Creative Cloud offers to sell you Sidekick again.
• Why you see three different Sidekick version numbers: what the “update available” message means.
• Snapshots fail with a cryptic “…is not defined” error: now covers every version where this happened.

Snapshots Are Back

Version 1.0.29 shipped with a fault that broke every snapshot: asking for a picture of a page, a spread, or a single object failed with the cryptic error _0x2ba7 is not defined, while everything else — reading layouts, editing text, moving objects — kept working normally.

This update fixes it, and there is nothing to do on your side: Sidekick picks it up automatically the next time your AI assistant starts, and snapshots simply work again. Nothing you did caused the error, and your documents were never affected.

Working From the First Run

Sidekick keeps itself current by fetching its newest InDesign abilities from our release site. On most networks that’s invisible. But on a network that blocks the site entirely, a fresh install could end up in a strange half-state: connected to InDesign, yet unable to actually do anything.

That can’t happen any more. Sidekick now ships with a complete copy of its abilities built in. If the download site can’t be reached, it simply uses that copy — everything works — and it quietly keeps trying in the background, switching to the newest version the moment it gets through.

A Straight Answer About Updates

Ask your AI assistant “is Sidekick up to date?” and you now get a plain answer: whether an update is in progress, when Sidekick last checked, what it last installed, and — if a check failed — what went wrong.

Previously this came back as a single status word that was easy to misread: “ready” could mean everything was fine or that the update check had quietly failed. Now it just tells you what’s going on, in a sentence.

No More Sitting on “Connecting…”

If you work somewhere with a company firewall, you may have opened the Sidekick panel and watched it say “Connecting…” and never change. Nothing was wrong with your setup, and nothing you did in InDesign would shift it.

The cause was a check for updates that ran before Sidekick opened its connection to InDesign. Most networks answer that check straight away, or turn it down outright. Some company networks do neither — they simply never reply, and Sidekick sat waiting.

It doesn’t wait any more. The connection to InDesign comes first and the update check follows, so a check that goes unanswered can’t hold anything up. Updates that get interrupted now pick up where they left off instead of starting over, which helps on the same unreliable connections. And if a check does fail, ask your AI assistant to run a health check — it will tell you what went wrong rather than leaving you to guess.

Several Assistant Windows, One InDesign

Having a few AI assistant windows open at once is perfectly normal. Only one of them talks to InDesign directly, though, and the others work through it.

If that one went away — you closed the window, or quit it in the middle of something — InDesign could stay out of reach until you restarted everything. The handover now sorts itself out, and the panel reconnects on its own.

A Redesigned Website

The site has been rebuilt around a proper editorial grid and set in a real typeface, and the setup instructions now show the two pieces you need side by side rather than as one long list.

Reviews on the homepage each carry their own star rating, so you can read what individual designers said rather than an average.

Reliability

The rest of this release went into how Sidekick copes when the network is slow, patchy, or blocked — the usual cause of connection trouble — on both Windows and macOS.