I love “findWhenTyping”-stuff: You know the new (sllloooooow-ass) search bar in windows vista in the start-menu and in every explorer? (Yes the thing they somehow borrowed from osx..)
In Firefox for instance there is Tools>Options>Advanced>”Search for text when I start typing“. So on any website you can just hit some letter-keys and it finds the occurence.

And they have it in the Options>Application tab as well as in the about:config. Just like it should be: If there is an interface with a list: You just never ever know how long the list can be. Will it be 10 entries or 7000? … I just made this a paradigm myself:

It’s a list? Offer findWhenTyping!

because manual scrolling and seeking just sucks.

Finally I had a little time to build such a thing myself. In our companys Maya-Toolkit (sorry no link, seems offline now) we have a lot of list-dialogs. Actually we have loads of list-dialogs all over the place. But the Maya toolkit is the only spot (thanks to my lame-ass scripting only skills) where I can put my hands on.

exept from the obvious things:

• on keystroke: list content automatically shows matches only
• entering nothing shows all entries
• matching is non-case-sensitive
• completely keyboard driven – you “can” handle the dialog without the mouse.

I have some additions that I haven’t seen in other similar dialogs:

• a phrase that has does not match anything still shows the last matches – so if you have a spelling mistake the list doesn’t go empty. An empty list would be just useless.
• first entry is always selected – so you don’t have to extra select something if you already typed the right letters – just hit enter
• when entering an asterisk * the default asterisks around the *phrase* will be omitted – so you can write start* and it matches everything that begins with start but not with start somewhere within.

What I need to implement in the future because its so useful in the AwesomeBar from firefox:

• hitting space starts a new search withing the current hits – this means you can combine keywords just with space. For example in your image-folder “cat cap” would find all pictures with “cat” in the name or tag but within this list only the ones with a “caption”-name or tag.

…

Ok. As I’m unable to finish this right now. I gonna just amend it with a video when I have something to show. :]

Hmmm been a while, huh? I’m a little rushed from some sides. But there is a lot up!

At the moment I’m actually blogging from the tUM in Karlsruhe Durlach! So Yes! a little demoscene again. And looks like I’m going to do a release myself! okok nothing really special: There is a music loop compo held. Its about a small piece of music (7sec) thats made to be played over again 3 or 4 times without getting boring. Actually my speciallity. Because every time I make music I don’t get past making loops. Finishing a track is not my cup of tea. I like arranging live. Isn’t it more exiting anyway? For apology on this spot I could say that good old Aril Brikha is recording his records this way only (at least I strongly believe he is doing it that way)! :]
If oficially released I gonna make the releases of our group available here.

Not much time for mel scripting though. But theres been at lease a little buzz on cgtalk about melDrop. But looks like I already threw it all over again on paper

Next version melDrop will be only directly available for script authors. Users get the melDrop script in the zips already so they don’t need to bother. Actually that wors already but I have some more thing up my sleeve that I need to work on the interface for. Apropos interface: This is gonna be awesome next version! All settings on one page. All on one view. You click Ok and see the installation progress and thats it. Plus arbitrary number of attached files and shelfButtons and Hotkeys with arbitrary commands.

The blog needs care as well I know.. I’d need to finish the about page and the language integration. But I upgraded to wordpress 2.7! Its not perfect but real cool that the next upgrades will be sans manually copy file by file.

pchew… I got the stone rolling

ok, this is the homepage for melDrop. I gonna fill it by the time. For now its just a placeholder. Stay tuned.

I just uploaded melDrop to highend3D.com but they gonna take a moment to approve it.

Update: Ok melDrop is up at highend3D:

melDrop – Maya script installer

There should be everthing you need to know about that. I updated resetPivot and temporary uploadet melDropEnabler to sendspace to be awailable as long as its not up at highend as well.
Ah yea and I created a little transparent logo!

ok. Lets give it a try. I gonna make a post on cgtalk about that ^^

Update: Ok I posted at cgtalk, percutio (german Maya forum) and now highend3D as well.. No comments so far. Its been 3 days! They don’t like it

I mean .. its not the video, isn’t it? People say its a little fast. I know.
Shall I make another recording and then everthing goes BAM??! I don’t think so. Nah whatever.. I gonna use it anyway.

Hehe :]

Technical director floh wasn’t thrilled.. But I actually was looking for a way to do this long time:

If you script code sometimes you define stuff, a variable e.g. at the point where you finally want to use this variable you need to go back to the definition somehow (via mouse or cursor) copy it and return to the point where you felt like having that variable available. A word-autocomplete might help in that case as well. But if your var has a long prefix and … nah!

What I actually was looking for:

• you get the idea: Oh I need this from over there
• I press a hotkey to remember the position
• you move to the thing you need and select it
• you press another hotkey

then its finished: The piece you where looking for is at the spot.
Ok now chill the fuck out: I got this:

This has nothing to do with the code editor: Its all Autohotkey:

• on Ctrl+Ins it figures out the typing-cursor/caret-position (does not always work FF e.g.)
• places a tooltip and waits for you to press enter
• you make a selection somewhere else
• If you press Enter: It gets the selection
• clicks the mouse to the old position
• inserts the selection
• restores clipboard and mouse position

Thats actually it! If you want to take a look at my puny source code:
or even want to test it out without having Autohotkey try the .exe:

http://goodsoul.de/ahk/rememberPosTool.ahk
http://goodsoul.de/ahk/rememberPosTool.exe
(virus total online check link: suspicios file… well it waits for your keystroke.. )

First I had an ac’tivAid UserHotkey-snippet without the hotkey on/off crap… but somehow UserHotkeys somehow deselects the current window. Need to look into this later… This example works much better. So it doesn’t matter if you click via mouse or select with keyboard.

BUT: now the downsides:

• I made it cancel when you scroll with the mouseWheel
• but if you scroll somehow else its broken of course! Works only on screenspace!
• some apps do not support the caret-position. Like Firefox for instance.

try on your own risk of course ;]

Oh if you are scripting or coding you might come across those “insights”. This is of course to share my thoughts but to have a place to keep and remember this stuff as well. I mean maybe this is completely bollocks!! Comment if you you think so! :]

Ok: fall-throughs:
As I always try to cover as many cases as possible (within reason of course!) I create a lot of masseges to the user. In this style I really became sick of that huge if-else blocks that have the fall-through-message at the end. These tree like creatures:

if ($condition1)
{
    // do all this ...

    if ($condition2)
    {
        if ($condition3)
        {
            // do this too ....
        }
        else
            error "bla because of ...";
    }
    else if ($condition4)
    {
        // do other stuff ...
    }
    else
        error "bla bla blub...";
}
else
    error "bla bla bla...";

this shows the usual style one would do: But there are major drawbacks: the conditions and the error-messages are at opposite positions. And if you add a condition that might escape the whole thing you’d have to add another “scoping-level”…
Ok, now the insight: I write the escape-relevant conditions in negative style a line in the very front of the script:

if (!$condition1)
    error "because of ...";
else if (!$condition2)
    error "because of ...";
else if (!$condition3)
    error "because of ...";
else if (!$condition4)
    error "because of ...";

// now do stuff ...

With this style I have the conditions right at the error messages. The indentation is much less deep. And all the stuff that could crap up the thing is coupled at a definite place.

Ok.. this might sound like kindergarten to a real programmer but. I felt quite smart when doing so ^^

whatever now I wrote it down. So be it.

Well.. as I want to use the site as platform for my MEL-publications and babbling about that I think I might introduce this a little. For you that don’t even know what I’m talking about: Don’t bother reading on :]

Maya is a great tool. Of course its not perfect. But there it reveals another greatness: Its own built in scripting language MEL. As Maya is actually almost completely build by MEL itself its really mighty in Maya.

So when working I asways come across stuff to add and change, making my workflow more and more efficient. Quite often my colleagues and even our companys production pipeline tool profits from these efforts. After years of scripting there is still a lot to learn but I already know quite some about making games with Maya.

I developed myself a kind of manifest to make my tools like. Its not always possible to fulfil all rules and its never finished. But here I think its a very good place to write it down and maybe amend it in the future.

Ok. What can I do to make a tool most enjoyable in Maya:

• give it a nice selfexplaining name (eriXSuperTool)
• make it multi-name safe (`ls -sl -l`)
• make it quite fool safe (at least when its possible to mess stuff up)
• make stuff context-sensitive (if applicable, if not: )
• make stuff optional
• select Maya Window after the action (simple custom windows don’t have hotkeys in Maya, if MayaWindow is selected after the action you can undo, scrubb or pan the view without extra clicking)
• make UIs sizable if helpful (e.g. for sliders)
• make values persistent if helpful (if there are many settings to do)
• close on action if helpful (maybe even optional)
• auto-convert selection if helpful (context-sensitivity as well, if a tool modifies vertices, why not let the user select faces to modify the verices of the faces)

I’d love to read comments about this. Maybe you have other nice ideas about that of critics. OK. Now I can post a script :]