[Bf-funboard] Buttons reorganisation

[Desoto]

I think your new layout is great with the exception of one thing:

The material selection drop down cannot be put back into the header 
because the headers are now supposed to fit better in the vertical 
layout.  I do believe there is room for the button in your redesign 
however.  I'd be please to see more screen shots if they're available.

I was actually thinking about suggesting this myself, and I began doing 
some toying around.  One panel that needs a bit of work is in the object 
buttons panel.  None of the buttons line up properly or have consistent 
spacing.

One further suggestion I have in regard to rearranging buttons is that 
the layer buttons be made in to five groups of four instead of four 
groups of five like so:

http://blender.spaceisbig.com/layer_buttons.jpg

instead of:

[][][][][] [][][][][]
[][][][][] [][][][][]

The spacing in ascii text is obviously exaggerated in the latter 
example, but I don't have time at the moment to produce a screen shot of 
the old setup.

I believe the four groups of five will make it easier for users to 
organize their layers and remember where they put things..but to aid in 
this even further I propose that layer buttons should alter their color 
based on whether or not there is content on the  layer.  Thus if you had 
something on layer five for example, the layer button in the header 
might change hues slightly to provide visual feedback.

I haven't had the chance yet to recode the layer buttons for the 3d view 
port headers but I do plan to just to show screens to you guys and here 
what you have to say about it.  I'm also planning on showing people in 
blenderchat and on blender.org.

The approach I've taken to modifying the layer button code is to 
dispense of the for-loop and instead hard code the positions of the 
buttons.  The loop was dividing four times, multiplying a few times, and 
adding a few times for every button drawn, which seemed a bit excessive. 
  The end result was that any time a single button changed, as with a 
mouseover event, all 20 buttons were redrawn, which would result in 80 
divisions, 24 multiplications, and 24 additions.  And thats every single 
  time the state of any button changes. Simply moving the mouse across 
the buttons would yield several hundred simple arithmetic operations 
that aren't necessary at all.  Sure they're blazing fast but I put the 
20 lines of code in by hand instead of in a loop, and in my opinion its 
easier to read and change, as well as being faster to draw.  Thats just 
my two cents.  I've lowered the load to twenty operations, one addition 
per button, every time the buttons redraw, as compared to 128.  It may 
not be much but its something! :D

Anyhow..its getting late and nobody will read this for a few days so I'm 
going to head to bed.  I think that a button reorganization is in order, 
not because the buttons are badly positioned now, but because I think if 
we put our heads together we can do even better, and make even more 
people happy.  I hope those words encourage a few of you to contribute 
your thoughts.  Thanks!

Desoto

William Reynish wrote:
> I have long felt the need to reorganise some of the
> Blender buttons. Especially now that we have this
> brilliant panle system, we need to think very
> carefully about wich buttons we place in what panel
> (and also where inside a panel) so that we don't make
> things even more confusing. An example of a (in my
> oppinion) wrongly placed button is the Edge toggle
> button in the Render buttons. This button currently
> resides in the Output panel, although it has nothing
> more to do with output than, say, Fields or Mblur.
> 
> I'm working on a proposal on buttons layout which has
> a series of guidelines to follow, but in the meantime
> you can check out my mockup of how the Material
> buttons could be rearranged slightly. See it here:
> http://www.shadeless.dk/materialbuttons.jpg 
> 
> You can see a brief explanation of a few of the
> changes here:
> http://www.shadeless.dk/materialbuttons_explain.jpg
> 
> 
> -William Reynish (Monkeyboi)
> 
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