[Bf-funboard] Toolbox and Menusystem

Thorsten Wilms bf-funboard@blender.org
Sat, 4 Oct 2003 20:34:01 +0200


On Sat, Oct 04, 2003 at 09:15:26AM -0700, Martin Poirier wrote:

> Ton already explained how it would be unuser friendly
> to add a temporal mode in and operation like that. See
> the Track To discusion.

True. Using a real mode wouldn't be good.

But I think of a floating dialog window with a explanatory text and 
2 buttons:
- 1 for executing the initialy desired action. Grayed out until 
that action can be executed.
- 1 for canceling / closing the window.

So this wouldn't be a mode but an action in standby.

Problems:
- Window will have to be moveable and will block some part of the 
screen.
- Quite some additional stuff to be coded.

For most things in Blender it makes perfect sense to select somthing,
than apply some action to it. But for things like the copy-commands 
it is not intuitive (or familiar from other apps) to make a 2 part 
selection (active object and selected objects) and then apply an action.
It works realy great, but you have to explicitly know about this.

So this is the problem that could be solved with those dialogs.



However, our options for the Toolbox are:
- only show commands that can be executed right away
- show commands with currently not fully met preconditions in a 
different style (grayish).
  - optionaly present something tooltip like with hints on mouse-over.
  - or display enlightening error messages after clicking
- use the dialog system mentioned before and explained above.


So I hope for some input considering those options.


---
Thorsten