PSPlant
PSPlant is a project I started work on in mid-2006. I was approached by Ben Haines who owns and runs PresetCentral(PSC) - an online preset repository for LightWave. The story behind that site is a little interesting, as it was forced to close a while back because of (as far as I can understand) a completely idiotic host and a security breach. At time of writing, it's back up as a blog, but will soon be hosted on a (better) dedicated host and go back to the functionality of before, and beyond.
I think this bit is where I came in to help. Ben told me his universe-conquering plan and asked me to help. Seeing the opportunity to be a universe overlord, I agreed. My brief was to write a preset manager client that sat on the user's PC (or Mac) and allowed them to a) manage their local presets and b) upload/download them to PSC. After spending a few years in the wilderness of web development, desktop development seemed a natural progression.
Progress Thus Far
So far, we're quite far along. We're very nearly feature-complete on the client and will be rolling out for testing as soon as we get the new host up and running. The webservice code is pretty much done as well, so there's not much more code left to be written.
The client was developed in .NET and as a result, I was interested to see how this would port over to a Mac. I don't own a Mac myself (I've probably got an "Apple is an evil company" blog post somewhere) but given that a not insignificant part of the userbase is Mac-based, I wanted to see if .NET was truly cross-platform, with the help of Mono. Because of my job, my desktop development experience was somewhat limited and restricted to Windows platforms only. When starting out the code, the main issue was to get something put together. When we started getting most of the features in, I began to think about cross-platform compatibility. I quickly found the main issue was that I couldn't use any windows-specific code - calls to unmanaged win32 dlls, calls to the registry etc. This prompted a quick re-write of some sections because I actually got something that run under a Linux desktop.
More problems were found though. The UI was screwed up (no idea why) and I was even further dismayed to hear about the general Mac userbase take on UI. They love their windows, they love their buttons, but only if they're exactly correct. I found out subsequently that entire Mac-based application projects have failed because they render the UI in a non-standard way on a Mac. This, apparently, is enough to significantly slow and halt any uptake. I was pointed at the documentation that Apple have had since the 80s as to exactly how big a button should be, where it should lie on a form, how big the client-writable area of that button is etc. etc. Obviously, hacking some .NET code around with mono wasn't going to cut it. At the moment, we're looking into options, but should have a native Mac client released shortly after the windows one.
Licensing
I'm planning to open-source the PSPlant code. License is tbd, but probably something like the LGPL. I'll update this section when I know more about what's going on, and when we actually have a release to give people.