djx has a bunch of pretty awesome posts on his site about making some of the zoo tools even better (in many cases thats not really very hard – there are a lot of nasty edges in many of my tools).  this one caught my eye just now.  i don’t really follow his blog, but every now and then wordpress tells me of incoming links – christ knows how this blogging software can be so awesome…  anyway, so wordpress told me about this post and dammit – I listened.  and so should you.  go check it out.  i’ll be checking it out myself to see how it works, and most likely, ripping his idea off.

isn’t there a saying?  good artists create, great artists steal…  or something like that.  google it.

so i’ve been a casual python user for a few years, but I’ve never really had that much to do with it – until we started using maya 2008 at work (i’ve been on v7 for a looong time now).  as such, i’ve kinda never really thought about using anything but my trusty old text editor jedit to write python scripts in.  but i recently stumbled across wing.  talk about awesome.  this is maya for python dev.  its freaking awesome!  its written in python, and there is a scripting interface to it – in python.  you can do all the fancy crap that ide’s like visual studio do and more (like interactive debugging).  plus if you’re a customisation freak like me, you can set hotkeys up the wazoo.  plus it has such nice, clean prefs files too – so its easy to syncronise the wing environment between multiple machines using something like svn or whatever your version control system of choice is.

anyway – python integration in maya is the single best improvement i think alias have ever done.  i’m not sure maya has actually been given a feature as useful as this since version 4.  if you’re just starting to tinker with mel – i highly recommend ditching it, and learning python instead.  its waaaaaaay more useful.