blender - the Blender bridge

From John (2026-08-14), added to the Bridge SDK as a SUGGESTED pattern for every bridge that drives a windowed app.

The problem. A caller that wants to see Blender today screenshots the first window whose title matches, and gets ONE window — but Blender has a main window plus any editor/preferences/render windows. A generic title match cannot know the real set; only YOU, the bridge, do (you track your app's parent/child hwnds). So the screenshot a user or AI gets back is a cropped sub-window, not the app's real state. We hit this live in the web-control demo: the Blender 'proof' screenshot was a single skinny panel instead of the whole app.

The suggestion: expose blender_state (read-only, non-gated, cheap to poll) that returns Blender's STATE OF THE UNION:

• A screenshot ARRAY of EVERY window Blender owns right now (all the parent + child/related windows), each captured by its real hwnd, returned as base64: { shots: [{ title, hwnd, image, width, height }] }. Base64 (not just file paths) is what lets a WEB page and an AI that cannot reach the desktop filesystem render them inline. File paths are fine to include too.
• Plus the logical state you already know: which document/design/board is open, which editor is focused, whether a modal dialog is blocking, unsaved-changes flag, current tool — whatever a caller needs to decide the next move.

Why it matters. It turns 'drive blind and hope' into 'look, then act': an AI calls blender_state before and after an action to confirm it landed, and a human demo shows Blender's true state instead of one window. ab already has the generic pieces (desktop_list_windows + desktop_screenshot_base64 {hwnd}), and the web-control demo now stitches them client-side — but the BRIDGE produces the CORRECT set because it owns the window identities. That is exactly the ab-renders / bridge-knows-its-app boundary.

No rush and not a contract change — a suggestion. If you add it, name it blender_state for consistency across bridges. Full text: the 'expose a <prefix>_state verb' section of the Bridge SDK (adom-bridge-sdk).