[Bf-funboard] Maya experience, anyone?

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi Gregor,

Thanks for the Maya review. Very good to have a report from someone's  
perception when he first uses it. It clearly points us to the weakest  
aspect of Blender; the 'easy to learn' one.

The current UI discussions and research are reflecting most of your  
hints. Check for example the thread "exanding the menus" from august 9  
here.

> - create well-structured pull-down menus (already worked on, I think)

Yep, aim is to have the pull-down menu system displaying the full  
toolset. No hidden hotkeys anymore!

> - provide bigger and more meaningful icons for certain tools; try to  
> create
> icons that the user can immediately associate with the task at hand

Toolbar concept; is being worked on.

> - 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

Our docboard likes to work on it... and I know several developers tried  
something in this direction as well. It's a *load* of work though.

> - 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).

Yep. Part of the make-over of the buttons.

Currently this UI work seems to have stalled a bit, but it's mainly  
because I didn't have time to write the report based on all discussions  
& research that has been done now... especially using IRC, emails and  
the forums at blender.org.
This report was scheduled for last week... I'll do my best! ;-)

-Ton-

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Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton@blender.org  
http://www.blender.org