Mac OS X Plugin/Part Manager

[JnyJny]

I wanted to share a preview of a part/plugin manager that I've been working on for Mac OS X.

<a href="http://ow.ly/i/SZcG" target="_blank"><img src="http://static.ow.ly/photos/normal/SZcG.jpg" alt="Owly Images" /></a>

Here, I've just dragged the DamnedAerospace folder into the "Available" parts column and the manager has automatically found all the parts in the folder and copied them into a particular installation of KSP ( the path at the top left ). Selecting a part on either table and double clicking moves it from one column to the other. Multiple selections are supported of course. The buttons on the lower left are "Add part" which opens an Open File dialog, "Remove Part" which can be used to delete a part from the file system permanently ( once it's moved to the Available column ) and "Edit Part" which will eventually bring up a part editor dialog.

The other tabs are a work in progress: Missions will show the contents of persistent.cfg and provide editing capabilities, Plugins will show plugin information and Inventory will be a more detailed view of parts. I also plan on a Ship tab to manage installing ships and comparing ship part lists with installed/available parts.

I haven't worked out how I will distribute it yet, I wrote this mainly for myself and my kids. Is anybody else interested in something like this?

[tjoreilly]

Very interested! ...and welcome to the forums!

[domox]

Very nice!

[JnyJny]

Some more features have been added and I've begun exploring distribution options. It's my understanding that Squad wants support programs to follow the same rules as plugins and parts, specifically have a license and distribute source code. I set up a github account and have started setting up the respository for the code, however I'm stuck behind a restrictive corporate firewall at the moment.

I'm working on the plugin version problem right now. The plugin DLLs are in PEF (portable executable format) which isn't natively supported on Mac OS X ( obviously ), so I'm having to roll my own methods of decoding a PEF file to get at the version information. Then I can start doing interesting stuff like de-conflicting plugins that come from different part distributions.

Once the github repository is live, I'll post over in "Tools & Applications" with a formal announcement. That will likely happen later on today.

[JnyJny]

KSP Manager is announced!