What's New

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.

Windows Install Fixed for Well-Stocked Computers

If you installed Sidekick on Windows and then typed indesign-sidekick in a terminal only to hear it’s “not recognized” — possibly alongside a small “PATH not updated” message during installation — this release is for you.

The installer’s final step is teaching your terminal where to find the Sidekick command. That step had a hidden limit: on computers where many tools have already claimed a spot on the terminal’s search list — common for people who use Cursor, VS Code or other developer tools, exactly the people connecting Sidekick to assistants beyond Claude — the step quietly gave up. Everything was installed correctly; your terminal just was never told.

The new installer handles a search list of any length, never adds itself twice, and leaves everything already on the list untouched. The fix lives in the installer itself, so it arrives with your next download rather than automatically: if you were affected, download the fresh installer from the install page and run it — your settings and your Adobe Exchange plugin stay as they are.

Follow Releases by RSS

You can now subscribe to these release notes in any feed reader via the What’s New feed. There’s also a plain-text version of the release history, handy for AI assistants and anyone who prefers markdown. Both make the same distinction this page does: changes that reach you automatically versus the rare plugin update that needs a visit to Adobe Exchange.

New Help Articles

Two additions to the help section, straight from real support cases:

• InDesign crashing during AI-assisted table edits — an InDesign quirk, not a Sidekick one, but there’s a simple ground rule that avoids it (and a save-first habit that makes it harmless).
• “Some Sidekick tools are missing” — what to do when the health check, layout or font tools seem to have vanished, and the quick reinstall that brings them back.

Sidekick Can Now Tell You When It’s Time to Update

Most Sidekick improvements arrive on their own — nothing to click, nothing to download. But once in a while a fix lives in the part that’s installed on your computer, and that part can’t update itself. The previous release had exactly such a fix: three tools that assistants had quietly stopped seeing, repaired only by reinstalling. Until now, there was no way to reach the people who needed it — if you didn’t happen to read this page, you’d never know.

That gap is now closed. When a release ships something important that can’t reach you automatically, Sidekick adds one short line to its replies letting Claude (or any other AI assistant) know an update is recommended and why, so it can pass that on to you — at most once a day, with a link to the install page. Updating takes a minute, and your settings and your Adobe Exchange plugin stay as they are.

A few things it will never do: it never installs anything by itself, it never nags mid-conversation (one quiet mention a day at most), and it stays completely silent unless we’ve deliberately marked a release as worth the trouble. Routine updates keep arriving the way they always have — invisibly.