[Bf-funboard] Expanding the menus

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

Although a Blender Screen can have many interfaces and tools, there's  
always only 1 active Object. 'Active' is a different concept in Blender  
than 'selected'... something we can discuss as well, but let's stick  
with it a while!

So: this 'edit xxxx' option you have below the 'editmode (tab)' one,  
can just be empty or greyed out when nothing is available.

Next problem then still is, that in the sequencer you have an active  
strip... in the ipowindow active curve or vertex, and so on. An attempt  
to have all tools & options in Blender organized within a single  
pulldown system therefore is quite a task...

However, we *could* adopt Apple's behaviour for this though...  
considering Blender itself is a window-manager. Although I don't like  
it to give up the automatic activating of Blender window on  
'mouse-over', we can agree on that a single click in a window will  
change the menus into one that reflects all of its options. And like in  
the Mac desktop, the leftmost can remain the 'main' Blender menu, and  
maybe even add the default 'Window' and 'Help' menus to the right...

This smells a bit like 'context menus', but we can then adopt for the  
toolbox to show only the actual options/tools that work based on  
selection/active status.

-Ton-



On Thursday, Aug 7, 2003, at 12:58 Europe/Amsterdam, Matt Ebb wrote:

>> I agree with keeping pull down menus static; at least not adopt the MS
>> way. What *could* be acceptable though is only presenting editmesh
>> options in Mesh editmode, editcurve options in Curve editmode, etc.
>> This wouldn't change the order of menu items in the main menu anyway.
>
> I just tried implementing this in a new top-level menu, but came  
> across the
> following problem (changing menu ickiness :/): The contents of this  
> menu
> will be different depending on what object is in editmode.
>
> But what gets shown in the menu when it's not in editmode? What gets  
> shown
> when no objects are selected? What gets shown when more than 1 object  
> is
> selected and the objects are of different type? And how can this be  
> made
> obvious to the user (since a clean solution isn't obvious to at least  
> me
> right now)?
>
> I'm not sure what the solution is - these are the sorts of yucky  
> things you
> have to deal with when you have a changing interface :/
>
> Matt
>
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------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton@blender.org  
http://www.blender.org