[Bf-funboard] William's ideas

[Matt Ebb]

(note: can you please send plain text mail instead of HTML? It makes it very
hard to reply to these messages).

And I thought today was going to be a quiet day when I could get some work
done - so much mail! ;)

>> Proposal 1 - Vertical text in collapsed horisontal panels
>> http://www.shadeless.dk/request1.jpg

Yep, it's ideally better than just a single letter, but according to Ton,
it's difficult to do in OpenGL and accounting for different font sizes, etc.
Even though text is much harder to read when vertical it's still an
improvement, and this can be put on the list and if there's time, can look
into it further.

>> Proposal 2 - Consistant arrows and menus
>> http://www.shadeless.dk/request2.jpg

As long as the menus are there by dedault, it's not a big deal to add this.
Thorsten is right about the disclusure triangle being somewhat abused here
though :). I can implement it with the triangle for now, but can someone
think of a better icon? Groo's sideways triangle ideas are good, but they'd
need to look different to the disclosure triangles to prevent confusion. Can
someone come up with a mockup for this icon?

>> Proposal 4 - use tabs whereever possible
>> http://www.shadeless.dk/request4.jpg

I'll reply to this in a new mail sice it's a complicated issue.

>> Proposal 5 - include Grab, Rotate and Scale in menus
>> http://www.shadeless.dk/request5.jpg

As mentioned before, grab, rotate, scale are all dependent on the mouse
pointer's position. Try using the grab/rotate/scale options in the pre 2.3
menus and you'll see how awful it is using it from a fixed position. Not
only is it uncomfortable, but including these in the menus could lead a
newbie to believe that that's the way Blender is *meant* to work which is
leaving a very bad impression. A solution could be to warp the pointer to
near the object's location, or to the center of the window, or something,
when the option is selected but that could be annoying. It woudl be great to
include those options in the menu, but we need a good proposal on how to do
it, that takes these issues into account.

>> Proposal 6 - More preset Screen styles
>> http://www.shadeless.dk/request6.jpg

This has been talked about before and agreed upon. What would help is for
people to upload some example .blends somewhere that can be used/tweaked and
included.

>> Proposal 7 - New cool startup screen with new functionality.
>> http://www.shadeless.dk/request8.jpg

It's an interesting idea, but can't be included like that. Because of
trademark and legal issues between the BF and NaN holdings, the Blender logo
has very clear rules about how it can be used, and can not be changed. If
you look at Ton's reply to Landis a while ago you can see some of the
rationale, but even neglecting the trademark issues, it's a common sense
thing for design - the logo must be consistent at all times. A couple of
months ago, I worked on a design project for Yamaha. They had a ~30 page
style guide with guidelines and rules regarding usage of their logo - it's a
very important issue :)

Adding functionality like opening up a welcome tutorial or something is
great - I doubt anything like that (or links to help from the menus) will be
in 2.3 though since it may take a fair bit of work (especially cross
platform). One idea though, until then, may be to include a very small
(<75KB or so?) PDF in the Blender package, with some basic introductions. It
would of course have to be written by someone though.

>> Proposal 8 - changing all Load/Save/Browse buttons
>> mockup: http://www.shadeless.dk/request9.jpg

Yup, that's good one. I actually wanted to do something similar, but using
the folder icons from the user prefs. It should be consistent one way or the
other though  - folder icon or ellipsis (...) ? any arguments/research
for/against?

Cheers

Matt