[Bf-committers] blender UI state

[Knapp]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 4:50 AM, Jorge Rodriguez
<jorge at lunarworkshop.com> wrote:

> You clicked it by mistake and do NOT want to save. I have done this many
>> times.
>>
>
> Having a prompt does not solve this problem. If there's a prompt then
> accepting the prompt becomes an automatic part of the user's muscle memory.
> Then the user has saved when they don't want to and bam, same problem.

As I said before I find it hard to hit things like shift or Ctrl etc
so sometimes I press Ctrl-s when I wanted shift-s. The confirm solves
this problem. Having an undo that undoes saves? Might work, if you
knew that you had saved.

> Unless you mean, the user was trying to Ctrl-D instead or something?
> There's better ways to solve this problem. Incremental saves. Undos.
> Version control. Saving is such a universal feature that Blender should
> confirm to the norm, which is to only produce a popup dialog if a file name
> has not been chosen.
>
> Yep, done that too but I have never lost my work due to Blenders
>> rather odd way of saving stuff.
>>
>
> Step 1. Open Blender
> Step 2. Modify the default cube somehow. Move it around for instance. Do
> not save.
> Step 3. Click the window's X button.
>
> This closes Blender without asking to save changes. I'm on Windows so
> perhaps this behavior does not appear on other platforms. It's unacceptable.

Yes, and then open blender and recover last session and you are back
to normal with a moved cube at lest on Linux.


> 1. Change to edit mode. A new user doesn't know that this is necessary to
> edit a mesh. A new user doesn't know that the mesh can't be edited in
> object mode. The new user must look it up. It's not in a menu. It's in a
> dropdown labeled "Object Mode" - the user may not know what that means, or
> that it's a dropdown, or that clicking it allows mode changes. "Edit Mode"
> in that dropdown isn't visible unless the user clicks something.
> 2. Choose an edit type. The new user doesn't know how to do this. There are
> three buttons on the button bar that do this but they are buried in other
> crap and not obvious. This is also not available in a menu.
> 3. Select something in the mesh to edit. This is a problem since the user
> will try to left click and select is right click. It may not even occur to
> some people to try right click. It's really damn frustrating not to be able
> to select things.
> 4. Choose whether to Grab, Rotate, Scale. The user does not know these
> shortcut keys exist. The buttons on the toolbar that provide Maya style
> manipulators are not obvious, and not the recommended way of operating
> Blender.

I know I did the first time I tried blender. The next time I found a
video by gray-beard called something like learning the user interface
and then all was good.


> 2. Select something to edit. Using left click like everything else does.
> Nobody cares that right click is superior - they already closed Blender
> because how the hell do you select things? Really I have no idea how right
> click select has persisted this long.

Yes it is really odd at first but I think it has persisted so long
because it is a much better system. I know that after using blender
for about 3 weeks I started wish, really really wishing that all other
GUIs worked like blender because it was so much better! (talking 2.4
here). Other users have said the same thing to me.

There are a lot of teachers on the teacher list that think switching
left and right click is way better for teaching and they teach the
program with these settings as default.

-- 
Douglas E Knapp