[Bf-committers] Newbies and Blender

[K. Richard Rhodes]

why not just have a tmp folder under the .blender folder?

On Fri, 2006-06-09 at 21:49 -0600, Chris Want wrote:
> I had an interesting experience this week teaching
> nine hours of blender to some new users (it was only supposed
> to be a three hour course *gulp*).
> 
> Seeing new people use blender, one becomes aware of
> certain traps that experienced users don't even think
> about anymore. There were a few things that I found
> particularly nasty:
> 
> 1) I think that the confirmation for quiting should
> also have a choice to save the file (whether it is
> modified or not, which blender does not test at all).
> A few people lost work due to undesired quiting. I
> would recommend a pop up that says:
> 
> Quit Blender?    (<---- first choice)
> Save file and quit?
> Cancel?
> 
> (or some variation of the above).
> 
> 2) I think there should be a big, scary, extreme
> warning for when the temp directory doesn't exist.
> If the temp directory doesn't exist, autosave doesn't
> work, and the quit.blend isn't written. Thus the
> people who unintentionally quit blender did not have
> a backup file to use... sad, sad, sad. (I designed
> my files on a unix system that had /tmp for the Temp
> dir, but C:\tmp did not exist on the lab machines.)
> What I would recommend is that at start up, the
> existence of the temp directory is queried, and if
> this directory does not exist there should be a
> pop up offering a platform specific alternative,
> e.g.,:
> 
> Warning! Autosave directory /tmp does not exist!
> Use C:\Temp?     (<---- first choice)
> Create /tmp?
> Work without autosave?
> 
> Something like that...
> 
> 3) The okee() dialog draws a little "OK?" on the
> titlebar of something that requires confirmation.
> Very often, the students would try to click the
> word 'OK', like they do in every other program.
> With blender, this is ineffective and they are
> expected to click the stuff underneath the word
> 'OK'. Should I really have to explain how to
> use a confirmation dialog?
> 
> Anyways, these were the main things that really
> bothered me... any comments?
> 
> Regards,
> Chris
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