[Bf-funboard] Maya experience, anyone?

[Gregor Mückl]

Hi!

I've spent a weekend toying with Maya and I am really impressed by its 
incredible interface.

I expected it to be very very cumbersome to use because of the myriads of 
features it has and me always searching for the right one. But it wasn't 
quite like that.

OK, the menu bar is stuffed with entries over and over again (up to 7 
different menu bars for the main window - you have to select the right one 
first :-). But I never thought that this could actually be a good thing. The 
menus have a very well thought-out structure which makes finding things 
relatively easy, although there are about 40+ entries in one single pulldown 
(many commands can work immediately and can show a parameter dialog first, 
when you select the box icon next to the actual menu entry)

The complete contents of all menu bars is also available through a star-shaped 
menu which pops up when the user presses the space key. With that menu there 
is no need to select a menu bar first via the dropdown in the lop left corner 
of the main window.

And even if I had to search for a certain feature I used the (quite good, but 
not complete) online help, which provides tutorials, reference manuals for 
the individual modules and "How do I?" and "What went wrong?" sections (which 
sometimes were unfortunately empty). The reference manual is in some way 
comparable to unix man pages: it gives a short, sharp and complete 
descriptions of the individual features. 

Searching is a breeze in the apparently homegrown search engine. The top of 
the browser window (in which the online help is displayed) always contains an 
entry field awaiting your keywords.

To me using Maya seemed to be so easy because it does not try to hide anything 
from the user. It shows everything and as a user you pick out the things you 
want. It's the exact opposite of what blender does.

And this is the reason why I writie all this: "borrow" from them. In 
particular: 

- create well-structured pull-down menus (already worked on, I think)
- provide bigger and more meaningful icons for certain tools; try to create 
icons that the user can immediately associate with the task at hand
- include a searchable online help; start out with a clean reference and a 
search feature; other contents can be added lateron, possible in 
topic-speicific FAQ sections
- replace the current button window with something more straight-forward: keep 
the bits and pieces of settings and information related to a single object 
closer together and seperate them more cleanly from global, scene-wide 
settings (a possible start would be a huge gap in the button bar that 
seperates the two topics).

I hope this oppinion helps. Maya really has a couple of nice ideas in its UI.

Regards,
Gregor