[Bf-committers] Re: Re: User-defined Material Properties

GSR gsr.b3d at infernal-iceberg.com
Mon Oct 17 17:27:35 CEST 2005


Hi,
gtmacdonald at gmail.com (2005-10-14 at 2123.07 -0500):
> Good design and forethought is never a minor issue. :) Have you ever seen
> those lawns where someone landscapes by occasionally adding a gnome here one
> day, a bush here another, maybe a pink flamingo next month. Looks like crap
> doesn't it?

Interesting example.

> Besides through these ramblings Doug has given me an idea. In vertical mode
> the panel's height could be expanded, but in horizontal mode the width could
> with the buttons drawn in columns. I'm interested to hear more about the UTF
> char selector though. I haven't seen that yet.

I would say the UTF char selector is just an input helper. The purpose
is inserting characters that are not known, and it has buttons to
control which group (some tens) is displayed of all the posible
characters (more than thousands). The characters have always fixed
ID. There was a proposal to be able to input UTF characters by number,
so the picker would be only required for strange cases, and common &
fast use would be possible via keyboard.

Properties seem something the user will assign in smaller quantities,
and want to see and also change more constantly. Order could not be
fixed. So it will be input and output UI. If there are ways to avoid
having to click to just read info, they are worth investigation.

For example, if each thing can be considered a small block (mostly
square, a normal panel would allow 4, 2*2), they could be used as
smallest unit for them (so panels would be 2*M or N*2 depending
layout). Other option is just making more panels or even a pair, one
for list with basic controls and other to show the full contents from
a limited group of list items. Maybe even with mouse over capability
so reviewing all the contents does not become a "click rage".

> On 10/14/05, Campbell Barton <cbarton at metavr.com> wrote:
> >
> > What about scrolling data within the panel? new UTF char selector does
> > this.
> > Could these finer points be discussed later? - Zr's modifiers were added
> > in and UI fixed up later.

Going out of view in horizontal mode is "fixed"? I hope you meant
temporary fix, not final. The usability suffer as soon has you have 3
(of the smallest kind) modifiers open or 7 closed, and in one case it
forces the scroll directly (wave mod). It does not scale up to the
task, specially if modifier kinds increase with future releases.

In any case, I will add these things to the second part of UI review.

GSR
 


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