[Bf-committers] Floating buttons proposal

[Jorge Rodriguez]

Micheal,

It's clear that you have some beef with me and I understand that. I don't
agree with a lot of the things you have said about me, but I won't argue
about them with you since it's clear that we won't agree. I think I may
have not made myself clear, which is a common problem that I have, so I
will try to clear up some miscommunications that we may have had.

1) I don't want to fundamentally change Blender. I dislike a lot of the
design decisions of Blender, this is true. But I also like a lot of the
design decisions of Blender. For example, I agree with just about
everything on the UI Paradigms wiki
page<http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/UI/UIParadigms>.
Perhaps I'm so busy criticizing the things that I disagree with that I
forget to mention the things I do well. This is my mistake.

2) I often have strong opinions and I love to debate. When I told Brecht
that I disagreed with him, my intention was to start a healthy debate, that
he may inform me why I was wrong and probably change my mind about one
thing or another. To this end I would improve the proposal and learn
something. I didn't mean that he was wrong or that I wouldn't listen to
what he said, only that I disagreed, as I'm entitled to do. Often my strong
opinions are interpreted as defiance on my part and this is another mistake
which I make often.

3) Many of the Blender team and myself have a fundamental disagreement on
the part of how to handle new users. Ton once said to me in IRC
(paraphrased) "New users are an unknown quantity. Ignore then and focus on
experienced users." This is an attitude that runs contrary to most of the
designers I've learned from and worked with. I respect that Blender should
be a tool for advanced users and I don't want to change that (please refer
to #1). I only want to remove common frustrations and create methods for
new users to become acclimated to Blender, ideally without getting in the
way of expert users. I don't think that this is a zero-sum game, I think
that features that are better for new users are also better for experts. I
try to keep all of my work compatible with the expert user workflow. It's
important to me as well as you that Blender remain a powerful tool for
power users. I think that the two things are not mutually exclusive.

Last) This thread is for giving feedback on my proposal. What's your
feedback? Do you think that having this option for users is a bad one? Do
you think that the existing toolbars serve this function better? Do you
think my design choices are poor? I created this thread for feedback, and I
would appreciate yours.

-- 
Jorge "Vino" Rodriguez
jorge at lunarworkshop.com
twitter: VinoBS
919.757.3066