[Bf-committers] Actuall usability of some tools and new features

[William Reynish]

Hi Damir,

Thanks for taking the time to write this mail. It's very appreciated when someone actually takes some time to write a more detailed, useful description of an issue.

I don't properly understand what you mean with issue 1 though. It is true that translations in Blender are modal, but that is true whether you enable it from a menu, a hotkey or the toolbar. Because of the new continuous grab feature, you get infinite screen space to move your items around, so you aren't constrained by the fact that the tool was invoked in the top left of the view. In fact, you can invoke any modal tool via the keyboard even if the cursor is far away from the object in question, so it's really identical to the one invoked with the G key.
The problem in 2.4x was that if you enabled transform from a menu, you'd be restricted in movement based on where that menu was on the screen - we no longer have that limitation.

Re. #2, The entire layouts have changed too. One of the main goals of the new layouts was to ensure that the most important features were located towards the top, so you wouldn't have to constantly scroll up and down. Also, the categories of panels make more sense, so you can more effectively collapse panels of grouped functionality than you could before (Old panels in 2.4x were essentially filled with random content).
Eventually I think it'd be nice to get the DPI setting in the preferences to truly scale the entire interface, so that you could simply set it at a lower value and all the buttons, areas, windows and labels would become smaller. Until then, you might want to zoom the view out.

Re. #3, I consider those bugs. Should eventually be fixed.
Re. #4 Perhaps think of panel titles as simply a text label. For smaller groups of items regular text labels are used, for larger groups panel headers. The idea is the same though: to group a set of items together.
Re. #5. Since we don't have a working toolbox (preferably with radial menus) the search feature gives quick access to any tool. In fact it's a very fast way to invoke an action. If that menu were hidden behind a complicated shortcut, that speed would be negated. I have comments on your issues with Windows Start buttons :)

Cheers,

-William

On 19 Nov, 2009, at 11:09 AM, Damir Prebeg wrote:

> I know that our programmers are making great efforts to make our beloved Blender better but I think that some UI changes and additions are not necessary a step forward.
> 
> 1. Translate and Scale buttons under Object Tools panel are impractical and almost unusable.
> Example: When I click on Move button, selected object will start to move instantly. Unless I hold the Shift key, by the time my cursor reaches middle of the screen, moved object will go outside of 3D view (btw, same happens with Duplicate button).
> Those buttons are having some purpose only if I manually type the value for translation or scale. I see now the second purpose for them: to show via tooltip what's the keyboard shortcut for move and scale function.
> 
> 2. Ok, I'm not happy but I can live with a decision to abandon horizontal layout. But current vertical solution requires way to much of scrolling because I don't have big monitor so that's a big problem for me (I'm still among 30% of people that is still using 1024x768 resolution). Excluding active programmers, we are all beginners with 2.50 and for a
> beginner it's hard to know in witch window some option is located when
> he must scroll down to see all options. This problem will make blender
> learning curve even steeper. Or not, if someone donate us all 30'' monitors.
> 
> 3. Well, we can't go without any scrolling, that's for sure but I don't completely understand scroll bar functionality. In some windows scroll bar is visible and it will scroll even if nothing is there (dope sheet for instance). In some windows click and drag of that gray dot on scroll bar ends will resize window content, but in some other will not.
> 
> 4. For me, In render buttons window/area (and not only there), It's hard to distinguish what's just an panel title, and what's an option. And I think I'm not the only one because I have seen some requests in the past to make panels more distinguishable.
> 
> 5. Almost last but not least, I'm not sure that replacement of the main menu (space key) with search is so bright idea. Let's imagine that Bill has suddenly decided to remove start menu button and usual Win key function replace with Run dialog...
> In that same search menu, let someone try to scroll to see all commands while slightly moving the mouse cursor. That's a quite impossible task.
> 
> Well, as I've said, that's not all but this mail is already too long and I hope that someone will have patience to read my bad English.
> 
> 
> Damir
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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