[Bf-committers] About the location of the Operator panel...

David Jeske davidj at gmail.com
Sun Jun 30 04:59:02 CEST 2013


On Jun 29, 2013 7:01 AM, "Ton Roosendaal" <ton at blender.org> wrote:

> If you need to patch design to make it usable, we better go back to look
> at the core design concepts itself.


While the 3 current operator UIs (menu-bar modal text, tools-opperator
panel, and F6 floating panel) are usable.. they don't seem to be part of
any core design concept. They don't even have the same visual style, so
they appear unrealted to each-other for the untrained user.

I saw one ultra-simple blenderartists proposal to merely make them visually
consistent, by simply standardizing on the F6-floating-panel color-theme
(white text on the black background) for all 3. Please forgive my super-bad
mockup... I couldn't find the better looking original mockup. I hope you
get the idea...

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/54578

A slightly larger change, which I personally like, also from blender
artists, is to combine the F6 panel and tools-operator-panel into one
thing.... In the lower right of 3dview. It would normally show "collapsed"
with only the current/last operator title. Clicking on it, or pressing F6,
would toggle it open, providing the full operator edit UI.

Again, I couldn't find the original mockups, so I made these really bad
ones... please forgive the bad quality...

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/54573
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/54574

In the case of trigger-buttons like Gaia's property panel button case, or
add-on UI like for cell-fracture <http://www.pasteall.org/pic/54579>, the
panel could open floating next to the button press and retire to the
lower-right corner after the user stopped interacting with it.

I plan to eventually generate a patch to the second one just to see how it
"feels".


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