[Bf-committers] [13276] trunk/blender/source/blender:

Chris Burt desoto at exenex.com
Sat Jan 19 04:38:47 CET 2008


I'll second this.. the buttons and tooltips aren't supposed to be an
encyclopedia of computer graphics terminology. They're just buttons.
You either know what it does when you press it, or you read the
documentation to find out. How "self-documenting" should a UI be?

--Chris

On Jan 18, 2008 8:06 PM, Matt Ebb <matt at mke3.net> wrote:
>
> On 19/01/2008, at 4:48 AM, GSR wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> > ideasman42 at gmail.com (2008-01-18 at 1328.43 +0100):
> >> IMHO Using the work Approximate is good, too many features have
> >> technical names, It could have been called  "Disk-Based AO" but
> >> "Approximate AO" tells the user not to expect accurate results as
> >> with
> >> raytraced.
> >
> > Screen space ao is also approximate. Tooltips are for describing
> > things and giving extra data, names are there to identify things.
>
> Names are there to identify things in a language that's actually
> useful for blender users to understand. "Approximate AO" gives artists
> a good indication of how it works, that it's more of a rough guess,
> differing to other AO. Calling it "Brecht's cool disk-based-spherical-
> harmonics-AO" gives no indication to artists on what it is, and would
> probably deter people from even trying it since it makes no sense to
> anyone but people who read technical papers.
>
> Brecht's done a great job in making his feature accessible and fast
> for people to use with minimal fussing around. All the technical
> details about the technique are there in the documentation, where they
> belong. People who are interested about how it works behind the scenes
> and want to search for papers (in percentage of artists who actually
> want to use the tool and get stuff done right now = close to zero) can
> do that quite easily following the links and descriptions there (or if
> that's not good enough, they can read the code!). This is the correct
> place to be describing things in detail, not on a button name where
> there's not enough space to describe it anyway.
>
> It's a bit arrogant and insulting to be demanding people to do things
> and calling it dumbification. It's not a matter of selling things,
> it's a matter of making software that is designed for artists to use
> well. People who want to get things done and have an interface that
> actually helps them use the software more easily are not dumb. An
> interface where you need to search google to find out what every
> gibberish-filled button does, is.
>
> Matt
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>


More information about the Bf-committers mailing list