[Bf-committers] Newbies and Blender

[Chris Want]

I had an interesting experience this week teaching
nine hours of blender to some new users (it was only supposed
to be a three hour course *gulp*).

Seeing new people use blender, one becomes aware of
certain traps that experienced users don't even think
about anymore. There were a few things that I found
particularly nasty:

1) I think that the confirmation for quiting should
also have a choice to save the file (whether it is
modified or not, which blender does not test at all).
A few people lost work due to undesired quiting. I
would recommend a pop up that says:

Quit Blender?    (<---- first choice)
Save file and quit?
Cancel?

(or some variation of the above).

2) I think there should be a big, scary, extreme
warning for when the temp directory doesn't exist.
If the temp directory doesn't exist, autosave doesn't
work, and the quit.blend isn't written. Thus the
people who unintentionally quit blender did not have
a backup file to use... sad, sad, sad. (I designed
my files on a unix system that had /tmp for the Temp
dir, but C:\tmp did not exist on the lab machines.)
What I would recommend is that at start up, the
existence of the temp directory is queried, and if
this directory does not exist there should be a
pop up offering a platform specific alternative,
e.g.,:

Warning! Autosave directory /tmp does not exist!
Use C:\Temp?     (<---- first choice)
Create /tmp?
Work without autosave?

Something like that...

3) The okee() dialog draws a little "OK?" on the
titlebar of something that requires confirmation.
Very often, the students would try to click the
word 'OK', like they do in every other program.
With blender, this is ineffective and they are
expected to click the stuff underneath the word
'OK'. Should I really have to explain how to
use a confirmation dialog?

Anyways, these were the main things that really
bothered me... any comments?

Regards,
Chris