The One Tool Challenge

Because there are so few useful and production ready Maya tools online. I was thinking how nice it would be, if every technical Maya user in the world would share (+support) even just one such tool in their lifetime. Putting it that way, should make it sound trivial. And if it were the case we would all be better off.
For myself I would consider prSelectionUi (https://vimeo.com/pazrot/prselectionui) to be a success in that regard. It is mostly for animators and after publishing it on highend3d and making a Vimeo video in 2012 it self distributed and to this day I find it installed at every company I go to and a lot of animators are using it.

In general I would recommend to consider:

• Is the tool actually useful? (doing something difficult != doing something useful)
• Can it already be done in Maya? Or has someone else already made a publicly available version?
• Is it useful enough for other people to be worth the time and effort to learn it, install it and keep it updated?
• Test it a while in production with a small group of people before sharing it publicly.
• Are you willing to support it?

If someone is looking for useful tool ideas. The most fundamental Maya UIs have a lot of room for improvement, so pretty much ever Maya user would benefit from those:

• Connection editor with name search/filter field to reduce the time and focus required to find the right attribute. Even with alphabetic ordering is it pretty tedious and that also does not work well together with child attributes, because it orders them together with the root attributes. In addition, it would also be nice to make it scalable, like the option to connect one output into multiple nodes input attributes at the same time.
• Add and Edit Attribute Editor for the 21st century. They have probably not been changed since 1999 and could benefit a lot from a major overhaul. I would also merge them into one.
• A non-destructive Node editor / Hypergraph: One that does not move the editor-view and nodes around on it's own when working with it. The node editor version would be a lot more work, so I would probably start with something closer to the Hypergraph.
• Attribute editor for multiple nodes at once (setting values applies to all nodes, not just one). I don't know how the aeTemplate reading works, so it might be really hard to do. In that case an improved Attribute Spread Sheet could be a better goal.

I'm not much of a UI guy, so that's probably why those have been on my mind for a while and I haven't done any of them. They also don't have the biggest impact, but a huge target audience.