[Bf-committers] These much talked tabs

[Paolo Acampora]

2014/1/19 Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org>

>
> - Ton Roosendaal expressed concerns that the new tabs are not clearly
> presented (or even designed) well, which causes too much discussion and
> opposition. Some people consider it work-flow centric, other see it as a
> fixed navigation feature. Some think most tools should be now become
> availble as button, others just want to be able to make custom tabs. Some
> think it's only for the toolbar region, others think it now will be added
> everywhere. Also the quite strong opposition against the "ui clutter" with
> vertical bars has not answered to in a satisfying way yet.
>
> In order to respect our release cycles, this topic should have been
> settled already... or we should postpone that to 2.71. It might be better
> to have design and code teams explore ways to handle these tabs (and other
> toolbar proposals) better.
>
> With the next "BCon" still 4 weeks away, we can wait a week with final
> decions on planning here. Jonathan Williamson thinks he knows how to get
> everyone (well almost all) happy with it. Will come back on the agenda to
> decide next week.
>
>
About these much discussed tabs, as a user and technical director I can't
think any good of it. They don't address any need, don't really help the
learning of blender, and make usage worse: you still have to know where
buttons are, but unlike blender classic interface you have to reach the
window boundary and click a tiny tab area instead than just scrolling down.
What if the tabs don't fit in the screen? Then you have to both scroll AND
click.

I don't want to sound offensive to the efforts put into tabs developement,
in fact what I see is not bad coding, but bad design, bad logic and a huge
error in taking a critical decision so lightly. Why is even someone
bothering with this? Did some blender user really say "Hey, you know, the
program is great, but I need a further menu layer to access this simple
action"? My impression is that the reason tabs are being implemented is
only that other applications use tabbed menus and it looks cool (of course,
not to me!). The current tab implementation resambles the Z-brush
interface. Z-brush has probably the worse interface in the 3D universe, as
many Z-users complain. If we really want to copy something we should look
at acclaimed solutions, not such unfortunate lame inconvenience.

I'm not UI fan-boy, blender could benefit a UI re-design, but not any UI
design, especially not when there are not specific needs on stake.

My two cents is that tabs should be put on hold until a complete review is
done and such changes should never be done so hastily. Also, I'm willing to
do a fund-raising for NOT-adding this feature.

Paolo