It was accepted into the Asset Store sometime yesterday. It was nice to work on it again. Despite its simple UI, it’s fairly complex underneath. Lots of parts in there. And lots of manual labor! JumpTo doesn’t use GUILayout, and I had to make so much of it from scratch. This has been a great learning experience, though. I’d like to log some more of the wisdom I’ve gained on the journey to v2.0.
I’ve got a couple of more tools I’d like to add to the Asset Store. These are things that I may have prototyped already, or they may only live in my development notes. I’m already working on one that was already pretty far along. Not up to a v1.0 gold release yet, but I’d say that it’s in a beta state.
Unity 5 broke a major feature of JumpTo, the ability to save links to prefab instances in the hierarchy. I submitted a bug to Unity over a year ago (see 674553 in Issue Tracker) from Unity 5.0.0f2. Finally, they got around to fixing it in 5.4.0b15! That’s a long time to wait, and the entire time, JumpTo has not been full featured.
But, at least they fixed it, I guess! Anyway, I’m now going to fix JumpTo and add support for multi-scene editing. Especially since…I made a sale! That’s right! Someone actually bought a copy of JumpTo! I ended up with a whopping $7, CASH MONEY! I may even pull 7 dollar bills out, spread them on the bed, and roll around in the pile. Or, better yet, $7 in quarters! Might make it feel more substantial, if not cold.
I’m kidding, of course. Not looking to get rich off of a Unity Editor tool on the Asset Store. Still, I was very surprised. I mean, it’s been published for well over a year now. Either way, to my one and only customer: my thanks!
As of October 16th, 2014, JumpTo is available for purchase through the Unity Asset Store!
Okay, I’ve put up a page with a features video for JumpTo. Began writing a quick how-to document to distribute as a PDF with the assembly.
And then I decided to take another look on the Asset Store to see if there was anything even similar. And, yeah, there is! There wasn’t when I started working on JumpTo. That’s why I even bothered. But there it is. With a few other features, even. Not happy right now. I shouldn’t be surprised, really. The other night I was telling a friend that it seemed like such an obviously missing feature in Unity. So of course someone else would make a favorites tool!
But, ya know what? I’m going to submit JumpTo to the Asset Store anyway. I’ve worked too damned hard on it not to try and release it.
I thought JumpTo was pretty much ready to be submitted to the Unity Asset Store for approval. I had been working on a video to show some of JumpTo’s features, and, while recording the window using CamStudio, I ran into a major showstopping bug.
Some set of circumstances causes the Hierarchy Links to reload from the save file when the scene is saved. Or, if no Links were saved for that scene, the Hierarchy Links will clear. So far, it’s difficult to reproduce. But the bug goes against the expected workflow while using JumpTo. Saving the scene should never cause the user to lose their JumpTo Links!
So, I’m delaying submission to the Asset Store until the issue is definitely fixed.
I’ve created a logo for JumpTo.
It’s pretty simple, and I don’t know if it says “Unity Object shortcut” or not. But, it’s what I came up with. The pale blue cube should be recognizable as the Unity prefab icon. It’s paired with the yellow star, which is common web browser iconography for a favorited/bookmarked item.
Created with Inkscape as an SVG. I used the cube tool and the star tool along with some extra polygon shapes (for the blue background) and gradients. By no means am I a vector graphics artist or an expert with Inkscape. In fact, the Imp Rock logo was pretty much my first effort with the software. So, don’t laugh. Or do. I don’t care.
I needed a logo for the Unity Asset Store imagery. Hopefully, I’ll be submitting JumpTo soon. Still haven’t really gotten to those tutorials and feature descriptions, though, and I want to have those up first.
Also added an icon to JumpTo’s EditorWindow tab. It’s a little yellow star 
. I thought it would help the window fit in with the standard tabs a little better.
Imp Rock is not my first web page adventure. Though, this is true only because I’m counting the Geocities page I had way back around 1995 or ’96. I had to actually write HTML by hand for that thing! And it was crap! Things are different now. Way different. Like, I-have-no-idea-what-I’m-doing different.
Enter WordPress. Now, I’ve tinkered with a WordPress blog before. That was a few years ago and it never went anywhere. Mainly it was just to see what it was about. I never really got past the part where you look at different themes to find one that you like and then make a few posts.
For Imp Rock, I have a few needs that need to be met by the theme, and for the life of me I couldn’t just find one. “Okay, ” I thought, “not a problem. I’ll just find a theme that’s tolerable and bend it to my will using my programming prowess.” Well, that hard and lean programming prowess quickly turned to lumpy jelly because I had no idea how WordPress worked under the hood. Never really looked at CSS before. And PHP? That was a minefield that I’ve never had the heart to cross.
After several days of tutorials, codex pages, and just randomly running into information that was relevant, I’ve got…something. It’s close enough to what I wanted that I can actually get some work done. CSS isn’t too bad, but I’m still avoiding that PHP minefield for now.
Over the next few days, I’m looking to put up a page about JumpTo, along with a feature showcase and a sweet, sweet help section. While the web content is being created, I’d like to get the Unity Asset Store publishing process started.